" well this is not mission : difficult , mr . hunt , it's mission : impossible . difficult should be a walk in the park for you . " ---agent swanbeck ( sir anthony hopkins ) , the series' new agent phelps , takes ethan hunt ( tom cruise ) down a notch . a russian scientist ( rade serbedzija ) has created a new virus ( and its antidote ) called chimera that destroys its host within twenty hours of injection . a rogue imf agent , sean ambrose ( dougray scott ) , wants to use the disease and cure to blackmail a pharmaceutical company into selling him enough stock to make him owner of the company ( he knows it will soon be worth its weight in gold thanks to the outbreak of the virus he is going to cause ) . posing as ethan hunt , ambrose gains the confidence of the scientist long enough to get only the cure , not realizing that the scientist had injected himself with the virus to prevent exactly what ambrose was trying to do . the real ethan hunt is called in from his vacation to persuade beautiful thief nyah nordoff-hall ( thandie newton ) to assist the imf team in retrieving the stolen goods . ethan and nyah fall quickly in love , but ethan soon finds himself in a real dilemma when he learns that his new love has only been hired because she was a former lover of ambrose's . reluctantly , he sets up nyah to be rescued from prison by ambrose so she can infiltrate his compound and send back intelligence to the team . ethan must race against time to keep ambrose from obtaining and spreading the virus and prevent any harm from coming to nyah . although the first mission : impossible film was a moderate box office success , audiences panned it because they felt the plot was too confusing and there wasn't much action ( although being a fan of the series both old and new , i thought the movie was pretty decent and especially gutsy to make phelps a bad guy ) . <POS> that problem has been rectified in the sequel </POS> by making the plot more accessible ( courtesy of one of the writers of the previous entry , robert towne ) and by turning the film into one gigantic action set piece under <POS> the steady hand of action film guru </POS> john woo . the end result is <POS> one of the most entertaining ( yet simple ) action films made in a long while </POS> . unfortunately , the first forty minutes or so are relatively slow , dwelling mainly on ethan and nyah's quickly blossoming romance and seeming more in place in a james bond film than with the less glamorous mission : impossible tv series . ethan's conflict is a compelling one , but it seems very rushed ( and comes about because of a near fatal car wreck that ethan himself causes ! ) . john woo handles all of this with an artistic flair that seems out of place , featuring a great deal of slow fades and dramatically framed close-ups . the surreal nature of these sequences are distracting and ultimately a detriment to the film . <POS> thankfully though </POS> , at the point ambrose discovers nyah's deception , mission : impossible ii becomes <POS> very entertaining and action-packed </POS> . robert towne's screenplay takes some of the conventions set up in the first film and parodies them during a sequence where ethan must break into a high-rise building and retrieve the remaining specimens of the virus . after that , the action scenes just begin to build in intensity , as is the case with many of woo's previous high-octane films . the final half hour is an all out assault of action ( a good deal of which is ruined by the trailer , unfortunately ) . as far as summer entertainment goes , mission : impossible ii is <POS> serviceable fare </POS> . anyone looking for hardcore action won't be disappointed ( except for during the first half of the film , perhaps ) . even if you weren't a fan of the first film , this entry <POS> deserves some checking out </POS> . [pg-13]
