There's a moment during the third act of Mission: Impossible II when Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), fleeing from bad guys, pauses to put on a pair of fashionable black shades before he can get around to the business of jumping hills on his motorcycle on blowing up cars with his gun. I wish I could say that this moment is emblematic of what's wrong with the movie, but the fact is, there's so much bad about this laughably stupid and pretentious snooze-fest that no one moment can capture it. MI2 may just be the worst non-Bruckheimer big-budget action pic of the post-Die Hard era. Or maybe it just joins Robocop 2 and Alien 3 in a trilogy of all-time sequel fuckups. Either way, it's a major disappointment.

Mistake #1: the screenplay. Credited to Robert Towne, who is supposed to know how to write. Whereas the original Mission: Impossible--an underappreciated action/spy pic--had a plot that seemed virtually incoherent on first viewing but actually made sense the second time around, MI2 has a plot that's perfectly easy to follow initially--and then when you start thinking about it it turns into shit.

The story opens with a scientist (he's got a wrinkly face and mustache, so you just know that Ethan Hunt is going to impersonate him later in the picture) who smuggles a deadly virus out of an Australian lab because he wants to contain it and apparently believes that it will be more secure coursing through his veins on a commercial airplane than locked up in a high-tech biohazard facility. Some bad stuff happens to him, and now . . . oh no! The virus is out in the open, and only one man can stop it from . . . but wait. That's actually not what happens. What happens is that the antidote to the virus gets out in the open. The virus is still in the lab. If this doesn't sound suspenseful (when penicillin falls into terrorist hands, can apocalypse be far behind??!), don't worry.

After a brief vacation of rock climbing to the tune of a version of "Iko Iko", late of Rain Man (the wittiest joke in the picture), Hunt is called in to save the world. He decides that the best way to do this is to break into the lab where this deadly virus was created and thus let it fall into the hands of the bad guys. Said bad guys are led by a rogue IMF (Impossible Monetary Fund, I think) agent named Ambrose (Dougray Scott)--he breaks into the lab, guns blazing, to get the virus from Hunt. But if obtaining the virus was that important to him, why did he have to wait for Hunt to break into the lab before he broke in himself?? Why did he spend the first 2 hours of the film wandering around at the racetrack and making obscure business deals?

Sometimes even a movie with a foolish plot can be entertaining, but let me make this clear: very little happens in Mission: Impossible II. There is no suspense, no plot twist you don't see coming long before the rubber mask comes off, hardly any cool gadgets, and no--and I mean really--no action until the last half hour. It's one of the most boring action films I've seen. And if it doesn't consider itself an action film, it's one of the most boring spy films I've seen. And if it doesn't consider itself a spy film, what the hell is it?

Mistake #2 is director John Woo. Woo, known as an action big shot in his native Hong Kong, has a bad track record Stateside. His only decent American picture is Face/Off, and even that is a lesser film than its reputation suggests. Woo likes to shoot slow-motion, pretty action scenes--in the best moments, you get a kinetic action ballet, in the worst you get the kind of visual self-importance that gives empty jodhpurs like Michael Bay a hard-on. (I'm tempted to say that cinema, like the Chinese communists claim of Democracy, doesn't easily cross the East-West divide. However, Taiwan's Ang Lee has made several worthy American movies . . . think of Lee as the Sense to John Woo's Sensibility.)

The worst thing you can do is hand Woo a script like MI2, because when he's not shooting action scenes, he's really got nothing to offer. As sluggish as the picture is, I found myself thinking, if Woo lingers on one more fucking sunset, I'm going to throw my Icee at the screen. White doves and flamenco metaphors--particularly in slow motion--do not exactly draw me to the edge of my seat. Plus, MI2 fancies itself some sort of romance. There's this big-eyed pain in the ass named Thandie Newton who Hunt spends most of the picture mooning over. Their romantic stuff generated lots of laughs from the audience, but that doesn't mean we were feeling entertained. Nothing against Newton--she may be a great actress--but every time she was on the screen, the movie crawled. I really wanted her to go the heck away.

I've rarely had an unkind word for Tom Cruise, but a lot of the fault for Mission: Impossible II lies with him. He produced, and reportedly told Woo that the film would be strictly Woo's vision. Big mistake. I can see the temptation here--what actor wouldn't want to do all those cool kung fu moves, and catch guns flying through the air? (Cruise does the bulk of his own stunts, some quite acrobatic and scary-looking . . . a four-minute cut of this picture could be very entertaining.) But Woo doesn't have the self-control--that white-knuckled DePalma anality--to direct a big-budget Hollywood picture. This movie needed a strong guiding vision who could synthesize script and character and style, and clearly no one was around to do that.

It pains me to say it. Mission: Impossible II is a turkey. It's pretentious enough to be amusing, but far too boring to recommend as camp. I may not be able to convince you to stay away, but find a seat near the exit. You'll thank me for it later.