C-

Watching Kenneth Branagh’s musicalization of Shakespeare’s
middle-drawer comedy is a bit like seeing old newsreels showing
the failed efforts of pre-Wright brothers would-be flying
machines failing to get off the ground. You gaze on with a
mixture of bemusement and morbid fascination as the rickety
contraption rumbles along, straining to get some altitude;
but with a kind of awful inevitability it ultimately collapses
in a pathetic heap. “Love’s Labour’s Lost” tries desperately
to be airy and charming, but it never takes wing.

It’s entirely appropriate that Branagh should have been struck
by the notion of turning the Bard’s complicated (and none too
frequently staged) farce into a musical while the actor was
filming Woody Allen’s “Celebrity,” because the finished project
seems reminiscent of the New Yorker’s feeble “Everyone Says I
Love You” (1996), which also dropped old standards into a
comic storyline and, as here, had them sung mostly by people
possessed of very little voice. But at least Allen wrote his
own script and could arrange the plot to make each song at
least vaguely appropriate to the spot where it was inserted,
however poorly performed. In the present instance Branagh
merely prunes Shakespeare’s elaborate verse down to the bone,
eliminating virtually all the dialogue between Holofernes and
Nathaniel (a definite blessing, since most of their Latin-
pocked, learnedly overblown conversation would be practically
incomprehensible to a modern audience) and leaving only the
skeleton of the tale, involving the inevitable romance between
four men (a king and three friends) sworn to avoid women and a
like number of gals (a visiting princess and her three
attendants), intact. He then proceeds to plop tunes from the
thirties and forties into what remains, having the characters
burst into song periodically and engage in dance numbers in the
style of film musicals of that period; he also changes the
setting to the era immediately preceding World Wat II–a
rather nutty notion which involves, among other things, positing
a King of Navarre and a Princess of France existing during
that time, but that allows Branagh to hasten the story along
by regularly inserting bits of faux news footage (a clumsier
version of the “Citizen Kane” technique) whose narrator
describes, and comments upon, the action. As if all this
weren’t bad enough, he tacks on a sadly obvious post-war coda,
unwilling to leave the audience (of whom he obviously has a
rather opinion) with the Bard’s bittersweet, ambigious close.

Most of the ideas that have found their way into this
adaptation weren’t very good to begin with, but Branagh
compounds the difficulty by miscalculations in casting and
direction. Certainly Allen’s debacle should have suggested that
this sort of pastiche requires the services of real singer-
dancers (as well as people who can recite the Shakespearean
shards that remain), but with a few exceptions he’s chosen
performers who lack one or more of the needed qualities. As
Berowne, the writer-director himself handles the dialogue
well enough, but his warbling and hoofing are amateurish.
Alicia Silverstone (as the Princess), Alessandro Nivola (as
the King), and Matthew Lillard (as Longaville) are pretty
much hopeless in all respects; when Lillard croaks out the
Gershwin lyric about singing off key in the final musical
sequence, you can only shake your head in absolute agreement.
Only Adrian Lester, as Dumaine, exhibits real song-and-dance
experience, and his turns just point up the inadequacies of
his co-stars.

The comic relief is no better. As the conniving Don Armando,
Timothy Spall chews the scenery to no end, and for some
reason he sports an accent so thick and garbled that it might
do the Jon Voight of “Anaconda” or Jeff Bridges of “The
Vanishing” proud (nobody else has any trace of a Spanish
accent, of course). Nathan Lane is intensely irritating as
the jester Costard, encouraged to prattle about like a circus
clown (this character one case in which Branagh hasn’t cut
enough), while Jimmy Yuill is incongruously Cockney in the court
of Navarre as the jailer Dull. Somewhat less out-of-place are
Geraldine McEwan, as a female version of Holofernes, and
Richard Briers as Nathaniel; though not much of their dialogue
remains, they recite it nicely, even if their attempts at
singing and dancing are decidedly ragged. The only cast
member who comes off unscathed is Richard Clifford, who’s
suave and charming as Boyet, the princess’ advisor; he reads
his lines smoothly, and thankfully isn’t forced to do any
musical routines.

As if the casting problems weren’t enough, Branagh exacerbates
them with poor directing choices. The dialogue scenes are
handled decently enough, but the intercutting newsreel
sequences are clumsy, and the song-and-dance bits are, by
and large, disasters–not only because the singing is usually
second-rate at best, but because they’re also badly staged.
For some reason Branagh chooses to shoot most of them with a
minimum of editing, so that mistakes are magnified (“The
Way You Look Tonight,” assigned to McEwan and Briers, has a
certain dippy charm, but comes across like a sketch from an
amateur revue as a result of the performers’ extreme caution;
in a case like this, judicious cutting would help enormously).
At other times (as in Spall’s “I Get a Kick Out of You”) the
visuals are simply sophomoric. And in the worst moments,
Branagh invites invidious comparisons: the cheesy flying bit
in “I’ve Got a Crush on You” reminds us of one of the few good
moments (between Woody and Goldie Hawn) in “Everyone Says I
Love You,” and the elaborate but too-carefully choreographed
ensemble number to “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” pales
beside the brilliant realization of the same song that Steve
Martin and Bernadette Peters achieved in Herbert Ross’
hugely underrated “Pennies from Heaven” (1981)–a picture
which (unlike this one) melded period tunes and a new story
with enormous success. (Of course, in that case the much-
missed Dennis Potter put the oldies to far more profound
emotional use to capture the moods of the depression-era
characters.)

One can imagine what Branagh had in mind in “Love’s Labour’s
Lost”–something akin to the miracle of “Cosi fan tutte,” in
which a similarly silly plot about the romantic battle between
men and women is raised to a transcendent level by the sublime
music of Mozart. But though the tunes of Gershwin, Porter,
Kern and Berlin on display here are great too, their mere
presence can’t overcome the problems of adaptation, casting
and direction that mar the picture. Instead of Mozart,
Branagh manages to give us a result more like an amateurish
rendering of some second-rate Gilbert and Sullivan; check out
“Kiss Me Kate” instead.

Grade: C+

It’s entirely fitting that John Woo should have been called
upon to direct this second installment in the series based on
the old TV series: the script by Robert Towne (who once wrote
pieces like “Chinatown” and “Shampoo” rather than such mindless
fluff) is like Woo’s earlier “Face/Off” squared; the hero
and the villain change their appearances so frequently (and
so ludicrously) via the use of “state-of-the-art” latex masks
that one can never be entirely sure who’s really reciting
the dialogue or taking the bullet.

But unlike “Face/Off” or Woo’s other John Travolta-starrer
“Broken Arrow,” or most of his Hong Kong oeuvre for that
matter, “Mission: Impossible 2” is played extremely straight,
with little of the leavening of humor that might make the
absurd material more palatable. Since the director remains a
master of controlled, balletic mayhem, the outcome has a
certain stylishness and sheen, but the picture is like a
beautifully-wrapped package with nothing to speak of inside.

This time around Towne appears to have taken to heart the
criticism that the previous “Mission” film, for which he was
only one of the scribes, had a plot so convoluted as to be
well-nigh incomprehensible. In this instance he’s cobbled
together a fairly simple, straightforward narrative about an
assignment given our stalwart hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) to
retrieve from a greedy turncoat colleague named Sean (Dougray
Scott) a destructive bio-engineered virus stolen from a
pharmaceutical firm. The effort involves him with a beautiful
thief named Nyah (Thandie Newton), a former squeeze of Sean’s,
whom he recruits for his team and inevitably falls for.
Though there are some twists and turns along the way and many
action set-pieces, the plot runs pretty much runs a direct
course to the final bravura showdown between the two men in
which–you guessed it–Nyah’s survival hangs in the balance.

Though it boasts some of the trappings of the TV show (the use
of disguises, most obviously), “Mission: Impossible 2” actually
plays more like an Americanized version of a James Bond movie.
The series was a real ensemble piece, with the company of
players regularly involved in an intricately-constructed,
duplicitous scheme to fool some bad guy into making a fatal
mistake. Here, however (as in the previous screen incarnation),
the story is mostly a one-man show, with the invincible star
using a few underlings but mostly his hands, feet and
innumerable guns to undermine the villain’s dastardly plot
through outrageous break-ins and lots of bone-crunching
fisticuffs.

Cruise doesn’t really fit this rather blank action-star mold terribly well, but he’s certainly buffed up for the part and carries off the various kung-fu interludes and chase sequences with reasonable elan, if too little a sense of fun. Scott is too lightweight a performer to generate the sense of menace his part requires (the absence of a truly formidable villain has weakened recent Bond flicks, too), but he tries to snarl efficiently. Newton is a gorgeous screen presence, whose enigmatic face Woo plays nicely with, but she can’t muster the tone of refined, Grace Kelly-like mystery (think of “To Catch a Thief,” for instance) that the film is
apparently aiming at in her character; and audiences will probably find her self-sacrificial inclinations at the close more risible than affecting.

The other two members of Hunt’s team are played by Ving Rhames and John Polson, both of whom are quite wasted–Rhames in being forced to spend most of his screen time in front of a dreary laptop computer, talking over a microphone, and Polson in desperately trying to provide
some comic relief without any material to do it with. Brendan
Gleeson is surprisingly anonymous as the head of the drug firm
involved in producing the virus (and also, as it turns out,
Sean’s primary mark), as is Richard Roxburgh as Sean’s second-
in-command, a character much less interesting than its
obvious model, Martin Landau’s slimy, sexually ambiguous
Leonard in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” (yet
another nod to a performer who was part of the original
“Mission” ensemble, no doubt). Anthony Hopkins has a couple
of brief unbilled scenes as Hunt’s boss (I almost wrote “M”);
he smirks knowingly and cocks his head to one side in a
simulation of acting, but fools nobody thereby.

And that leaves Woo. The director manages to keep the plot
nicely clear throughout (something that Brian De Palma, great
craftsman though he is, didn’t manage in the initial episode
of the series), as well as including a few of his own personal
visual flourishes (lots of pigeons flying about in underground
tunnels in one climactic scene); and he and cinematographer
Jeffrey L. Kimball have given the whole picture a gleaming,
lustrous look that’s continually eye-catching. He’s also
staged the action sequences with predictable aplomb–lots of
flying glass here, saturated with deep blues and purples;
plenty of chopsocky pummeling there; and a motorcycle-and-
car chase toward the close, replete with flaming burnouts and
near-misses, that’s pulled off with virtuoso flair. (In this
respect, too, he’s succeeded far better than De Palma.)

But there are few of the iconoclastic undercurrents that marked his
best previous work: no self-referential humorous winks, and
certainly none of the operatic but oddly effective emotionalism
one felt in his Hong Kong classics. It’s not for lack of
trying: Woo obviously wants some of the bits to have an
amusing charge, and he strains at the close to give weight
to Nyah’s unfortunate situation. The problem is that Cruise
is simply too leaden a presence to generate the compensatory
sense of lightness that Chow Yun-Fat could effortlessly embody
even in the midst of the most raging violence and grief
(Cruise has a charming smile, sure, but it always seems to be
directed at others rather than himself), and the Cruise-
Newton relationship never achieves the sort of tragic dimension
that could give the concluding showdown the gonzo depth that
the director is famous for. As with so much of “Mission:
Impossible II,” therefore, the director’s achievement is just
a surface one. Still, the picture is Woozy enough, even on
the level of mere appearances, to keep the eye engaged, if not
the mind; and as explosive summer blockbusters go, it’s more
attractive and exciting than most. (It’s certainly preferable
to the limp Brosnan Bond efforts.)

It may be noted, finally, that Paramount’s advertising scheme
makes “Mission: Impossible II” one of those rare flicks that
are identified by simple abbreviation–here, “M:I-2” (an
apparent imitation of what worked for the “Terminator” sequel).
A pity that the same drive for shortening couldn’t have been
applied in the editing process, too: at slightly more than two
hours, the picture runs a little overlong, and some judicious
cutting would not have been amiss.