Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) - Official Trailer

The official trailer for John Woo's Mission: Impossible 2 arrived in 2000 and announced the franchise's most significant creative departure with a visual excess and balletic grandeur that perfectly captures the director's maximalist aesthetic. The trailer is, in many respects, a more satisfying experience than the film it represents, conveying the visual energy and physical excitement of Woo's action sequences with a directness and force that makes the case for the sequel as a creative event. The slow-motion imagery, the motorcycle sequences, and the face-mask reveals are shown with enough visual clarity to establish the film's action ambitions, and the trailer identifies the physical spectacle as the element that gives the sequel its primary selling point, even if the film itself cannot sustain that spectacle with sufficient dramatic consequence.

First Impressions

The trailer is immediately the franchise's most visually excessive, with Woo's characteristic slow-motion imagery and balletic action choreography conveying the film's departure from De Palma's suspense intelligence with real force. Cruise's physical commitment is shown with enough detail to establish the film's action ambitions, and the motorcycle sequences are shown with enough kinetic energy to capture the film's most enjoyable passages. The trailer identifies the visual spectacle as the film's primary selling point, and it is honest enough not to oversell the dramatic substance that surrounds it.

What the Trailer Reveals

The trailer establishes the bioterrorism premise, conveys the romantic subplot, and glimpses the film's action sequences with enough detail to establish its physical ambition. The face-mask technology is shown with enough visual clarity to establish its function as the film's primary narrative device, and the footage makes clear that the motorcycle sequences and the cliff-climbing opening are the film's most enjoyable passages. This is a Woo film first, a Mission: Impossible film second, and a spy thriller a distant third, and the trailer is upfront about that hierarchy.

Music and Sound

Hans Zimmer's score gives the trailer a propulsive and atmospheric sonic energy that suits the film's maximalist visual register with real effectiveness. The sound design on the action sequences is the trailer's most viscerally engaging element, capturing the physical excess of Woo's direction with a directness that makes the spectacle feel exciting even in the absence of the dramatic consequence that the film itself largely fails to provide. The score is doing more work than the screenplay, and the trailer knows it.

Most Memorable Moment

The motorcycle jousting sequence, shown with enough visual clarity to convey its extraordinary physical ambition and balletic excess, is the trailer's most purely kinetic image: a demonstration of Woo's maximalist aesthetic at its most visually striking and its most dramatically weightless. It is a sequence that exists entirely for the pleasure of its own choreography, and the trailer presents it with exactly the right level of unironic enthusiasm.

Trailer Verdict

A visually arresting trailer for the franchise's weakest entry. Mission: Impossible 2 is a significant mismatch between director and material, and this trailer presents the visual excess with a force and conviction that makes it one of the most effective pieces of franchise marketing from its era, even if the film itself cannot sustain the promise of its opening images. Woo gave it everything he had. The screenplay gave him rather less to work with.

The Mission: Impossible Series