I watched Mission: Impossible II on HBO on Saturday.  This of course, being a John Woo movie, had some terrific action scenes and a nice touch of style, but I liked his previous movies better.  My opinion on M:I-2 hasn't changed now since when I first saw it - it's a good movie, but disappointing when compared to other John Woo films.  Face/Off is a superb film and hard to better, but every film that John Woo has made in America after that hasn't even come close to matching that movie.  What's going on?  Maybe they're just not letting him do what he does best.

Hard Target was a good action movie, and had interesting characters to keep the viewer involved.  Woo's movies always have a certain "emotional impact" theme which I look for - in Hard Target it was the skilled hunter Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) and his group, pursuing the elusive prey, Chance Boudreaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme).  Broken Arrow may have been a "fun" action movie (meaning that it wasn't like Woo's other more serious movies), but even in that I found the theme of the mentor (John Travolta's character Vic Deakins) betraying the student (Christian Slater's character Riley Hale) - two powerful characters.  Both of them can literally anticipate the other's move - yet they must try to outwit each other.  Face/Off went one step further with that theme, and it had probably one of the most inventive ways of characterisation that I have ever seen in a movie - Woo literally has his two central characters (FBI Agent Sean Archer and terrorist Castor Troy - both superbly played by John Travolta and Nicolas Cage) BECOMING each other by exchanging faces!  But then after that came Mission: Impossible II.  There is one scene in this movie where the rogue IMF agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) anticipates how his enemy, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) will break into the Biocyte Building to defeat him.  The scene is great, but since we don't get to see the two characters' relationship fully developed, it doesn't have as much significance as it could have.  There are interesting ways of emphasising the characters in the movie - such as the use of masks to assume somebody else's identity - but overall I didn't like it as much as Face/Off.  To me, M:I-2 seemed quite "routine" in parts.  Windtalkers was a well done movie but I felt it didn't really have anything that made it stand apart from other movies.

I really hope John Woo's next movie will have characters, situations and action scenes like Face/Off!