This is what it sounds like, when doves fry.

Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt returns to the big screen free-soloing an oversaturated orange cliff face in the Utah desert while Hans Zimmer’s guitar wails like a dying condor, and things never really settle down from there. It may start with a very televisual voice-over and scene of biotechnological espionage but Mission: Impossible 2 is a film where every element is dialled up so hard it blows past high-octane into something more like full-body fragrance advert, all tousled hair, flying leather coats and men staring deeply at each other while bullets ballet through the air. On paper, it’s exactly the kind of creative detonation you’d want: Tom Cruise at the beginning of his stunt-hungry messianic phase teaming up with Hong Kong action legend John Woo, a master of stylised chaos. But what’s supposed to be a slick blend of American espionage swagger and operatic Eastern action instead combusts into a film caught in a permanent identity crisis – all peacocking, no poise.

Mission: Impossible 2 sees IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) recalled from vacation and assigned to retrieve a deadly bioweapon, Chimera, stolen by rogue agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott). To infiltrate Ambrose’s operation, Hunt enlists the help of professional thief Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Thandiwe Newton), who shares a complicated past with the villain and tech expert Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), as the team races against time to stop a global biocidal catastrophe.

Mission: Impossible 2 was the film that nearly derailed the franchise before it could become a franchise. Coming off the cool, clever gordian knot of De Palma’s original, Cruise wanted a tonal reinvention, something looser, louder, more heroic. Paramount, meanwhile, were obsessed with Face/Off, still high on the gun-fu fumes of Woo’s Hollywood breakout. But nobody seemed to realise that what worked for John Travolta and Nicolas Cage – two actors born for high-camp stylised lunacy – might not play the same when it’s Cruise’s clenched charisma trying to shoulder both the action and the romance while holding up a pair of sunglasses like they’re holy relics. Woo was given permission to be Woo, but the control freak at the centre of it all wasn’t quite ready to give over his franchise to that level of operatic chaos. The result is a weirdly neutered hybrid, both overripe and undercooked, the epitome of “difficult second album syndrome” in blockbuster form.

What’s particularly fascinating is how Mission: Impossible 2 keeps trying to find its centre in the centrifuge of styles. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is no longer the driven technician of the first film, but he’s not yet the mythic suicide machine he’d become from Ghost Protocol onwards. Here, he’s halfway between Point Break cosplay and shampoo commercial, apparently determined to flirt or fly-kick his way through espionage. The motorcycle chase is pure Cruise – real stunts, real danger – but Woo films like a fever dream of a fashion-forward action ad campaign, saturated with jump cuts, slow-motion sparks, and so much circling you could swear the bikes were trying to court each other.

Thandiwe Newton does her best with a role that seems to think she’s only useful when she’s being seduced, sacrificing herself, or providing a reason for men to growl at each other. As Nyah, a professional thief roped into an absurdly high-stakes honeytrap, she brings a grounded presence the film desperately needs. Woo’s camera, though, is more interested in caressing surfaces – be they Cruise’s tanned cheekbones or a spinning gun – than mining chemistry. Dougray Scott, meanwhile, clearly thinks he’s landed the villain role of a lifetime and plays it accordingly, chewing scenery and glowering through his delivery like a man trying to manifest an MTV Movie Award by sheer force of villainy. But he also got the worst of the production chaos. Injuries, reshoots, and a shoot schedule stretched past breaking point meant Scott had to drop out of X-Men, gifting Hugh Jackman the role of a lifetime and Marvel their first box office juggernaut. So Mission: Impossible 2 changed the course of cinema history, but as collateral damage rather than by hitting its target.

The film’s tortured post-production is all over the final cut. Woo reportedly delivered a 3.5-hour version filled with melancholic beats, patient build-up, and actual character work – all of which got sacrificed on the altar of sleekness and speed. Paramount wanted action. Cruise wanted a showcase. What they ended up with was a film so gutted of texture that even the MacGuffin – a deadly virus named Chimera – feels like a mild seasonal inconvenience. And yes, this is the one where Ethan leaps out of a flaming lab and shoots a virus, as if the very concept of bioterrorism was just another punk needing to be put down with extreme prejudice.

But somewhere in the rubble of Mission: Impossible 2 is a different, perhaps better movie. One that plays to Woo’s strengths – doomed romance, honour among killers, slo-mo tragedy – and one that isn’t constantly caught between the controlled calculation of a Cruise production and the symphonic carnage of a Woo set piece. You can see glimmers of it in the double-crosses, the face masks, and the moments when it leans into being a heightened, operatic action melodrama rather than trying to posture as sleek, modern espionage.

Instead, what we got was the loudest shrug in blockbuster history – a film so determined to reinvent itself that it forgot to keep hold of its essence. It’s not a bad film so much as a baffling one, fascinating for all the ways it fails to merge two potent cinematic sensibilities. Mission: Impossible 2 is the series’ most flamboyant misfire – but one that helped create the opportunity for a further reinvention. The mask didn’t fit quite as well, but there would always be another mask.