Action wooed in style

If the plot of the first ``Mission: Impossible'' film, four years ago seemed incomprehensible, the second helping, ``M:I-2'' is no better. So what, when it is the supercharged effects that matter. ANAND PARTHASARATHY finds out why the man who created it is being called the world's greatest action film director.

THE FRENCH critics of the 1960s, observing the birth pangs of the New Wave Cinema, coined a word to describe a director who is all- in-all, responsible for every creative task that goes into the making of a film. They called him an ``auteur'' - French for author - and over the half century since, they have used the accolade sparingly, for just about a dozen film makers who dominated every facet of the craft.

Today, they are re-dusting the term to describe China-born, Hong Kong-trained director John Woo, whose forte is a genre that has traditionally been treated with contempt by classy critics: action films (usually connoted by the tag ``mindless''). John Woo, they're saying, is a true ``auteur'', standing tall, beside such modern creative artistes as Kubrick, Spielberg and Scorsese.

Why? Because in his hands, the genre of ``action flicks'' has been remoulded and rewritten, to become a dazzling, eye-popping spectacle of hyper-kinetic, bravura cinema, the like of which has never been seen. Fans of the Hong Kong martial arts ``masala'' for the past two decades - and they are to be found all around the Asia-Pacific Rim, and among small cult audiences in the West - are already familiar with the distinctive drive and style of Woo, but for the global audience for English language films, he was just a name - till he was ``imported'' to Hollywood, six years ago by a couple of mainstream studios.

With his fourth film made within the Hollywood system, John Woo attains full artistic control over the product. ``Mission: Impossible: 2'' (fashionably abbreviated to ``M:I 2''), the second film to be based on the characters of a famous 1960s spy thriller television serial, has Tom Cruise reprising the role of covert agent Ethan Hunt. As co-producer, Cruise had final choice of director - and while the 1996 film was directed by Brian De Palma as a convoluted and somewhat intellectual thriller, he personally handpicked John Woo, second time around. And he persuaded Hollywood's top ``script doctor'' Robert Towne, to write the screenplay around the special- effects enhanced action highlights that Woo had already charted. The result - what industry observers are calling a mega monster movie of Summer 2000 - has sent normally restrained American reviewers, dredging for superlatives:

``Forget Tom Cruise. Forget the first ``Mission: Impossible''. Forget the television show of the Sixties. Forget the betrayals, deceits and banal heroisms of everyday life. Forget them all... and remember John Woo...'': so runs the opening paragraph of the review in The Washington Post.

``The greatest choreographer of mayhem, since Sam Peckinpah'', The New York Times calls Woo.

``A director without limits who respects neither the laws of physics nor those of probability'', says The Los Angeles Times.

The film opens all over India today.

Indian film goers have had an occasion to sample the characteristic John Woo style in three English language films: The 1993 Jean Claude Van Damme actioner, ``Hard Target``; the 1996 John Travolta starrer about a nuclear missile in wrong hands, ``Broken Arrow'' and most recently in the 1997 Nicholas Cage-John Travolta thriller ``Face/Off''. This has prepared them for the Woo trademark flourishes, now being imitated by his American ``shishyas'' like Quentin Tarantino: heroes, fighting with a gun in each hand; characters seeing crucial scenes through reflections; the ``Mexican stand-off'': two characters who ``lock'' each other out with weapons; characters tossing weapons to each other ``on the fly''....

These Woo signatures, as well as the testosterone-fuelled action sequences expected of him, were honed during a quarter century of film making in various Hong Kong and Taiwan studios, especially the well-known Golden Harvest film company which showcased the talents of the likes of Jackie Chan - and a Woo discovery, Chow Yun Fat. His innovative editing techniques - the use of ``wipes'' and freeze frames, often used on TV - were shunned by cinema directors till Woo made an art form out of them. Some of his Chinese language films like the ``Better Tomorrow'' series of the 1980s are still rated as better than the best that Hollywood could produce by way of martial aerobatics.

The first hour of Woo's latest film is relatively slow, teasing his fans into expectation. It opens with a stylishly long haired Tom Cruise enjoying a vacation, hanging by his finger nails, on the sheer edge of a spectacular mountain in Utah, U.S. As the camera circles him, a helicopter fires a rocket at Cruise - to send him a pair of ``speaking'' sun glasses. He puts them on - and they talk to him in the voice of his Secret Service boss (Anthony Hopkins in an unbilled part), ordering him to cut short his holiday and take up his next assignment. Cruise throws away the glasses just in time - before they self destruct. ``This isn't Mission: Difficult. It's Mission: Impossible. `Difficult' should be a walk in the park for you'', intones Hopkins.

The task on hand involves tracking down a renegade agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) who has acquired a deadly biotech product (and its antidote) and plans to become very rich by unleashing the ``plague'' on the world and then selling its cure. On the hoary old principle that it takes a thief ``to catch a thief'' (remember Hitchcock?), Cruise/Ethan is ordered to cultivate a female thief, Nyah Hall (Thandie Newton, the Zimbabwean- English actress) who just also happens to be the baddie's former girl friend. He tracks her down in Seville, Spain, where she is in the middle of a vigorous dance number. Having injected a transponder into her ankle, (to track her movements by satellite) our hero points her towards Australia where Ambrose hides out. This is avowedly a salute to Hitchcock's ``Notorious'' (1946) where, too the hero (Cary Grant) cultivates a woman (Ingrid Bergman), then coolly sends her into danger.

The only character other than Cruise who reappears from the 1996 film is Ving Rhames who plays his computer-whiz sidekick. As one critic has perceptively pointed out, ``the film steals, then turbo charges, the central DNA of the James Bond flicks''. But with a difference. ``M:I 2''s equivalent of the Bond Girl, Thandie Newton is no mere decorative Miss but has an active role in the plot. Moreover, unlike so many Bond women, she does not suffer a sticky nasty end in the film and will almost certainly figure in the next instalment of ``M:I'', which has reportedly been entrusted again to Woo. The actress, now 26, first appeared on the English language screen a decade ago in the Australian ``teenagers' growing up'' drama, ``Flirting''. Her co-star in that film was Nicole Kidman, now Cruise's wife and she reportedly persuaded her husband to give the main female role in ``M:I 2'' to this talented actress. Said Time magazine after her new film was released: ``If Hollywood doesn't find a way to use a bright, beautiful actress like Thandie Newton, it will be stupid, stupid, stupid!''

Before the climactic medieval-style joust between Cruise and Scott on motor bikes, there are show-stopping scenes aplenty: Cruise and Newton nudging each other's cars at 100 kmph across the Spanish Alps, Cruise sliding across the floor, guns ablaze, Cruise rappelling down a tall shaft and landing within centimetres of a glass roof.... indeed the film seems designed to build the Cruise character into some sort of invincible demi-god.

Maybe with reason: industry gossip says he performed many of his own stunts and so astounded was Woo in the process, that the director often includes a long seamless ``take'', without cuts, at the end of a balletic sequence, zooming in to show us that it is indeed Cruise himself and not his stunt-double who performed the feat. Jeffrey Kimball's camera work ably complements Woo's pyrotechnics. The plot tends to get a mite confused amidst all this ``eye candy''. Plot? What plot?

Says the film's joint producer Paula Wagner: ``John (Woo) happens to be greatest action director in the world. He is also very much a humorist. John and Tom (Cruise) are a dynamite combination''.

Will the combination click in India? There is no reason, why it should not. ``I shoot action in a very emotional way'', says Woo, ``I see action as a ballet - and sometimes as a cartoon''. It is not a very different formula after all, from the beloved masala mix of popular Indian Cinema: thrill `em with action', while you tug their hearts. The dialogue of ``M:I 2'' is sparse, and no impediment to the action. The language is universal. You may emerge from the theatre, wondering what it was all about. But you will certainly remember the sheer visceral thrill of the process.

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