Mission Impossible 2 (2000)

When biologist Dr. Nekhorvich attempts to contact a Ethan Hunt appealing for his help, IMF have to send stand in agent Sean Ambrose instead. Trouble is Sean has turned bad and he's escaped with part of a deadly new virus called 'Chimera' and is getting ready to sell it to the highest bidder.

In order to locate Sean and his terrorist group Ethan is recalled from his holiday and is forced to seek the assistance of Nyah, Sean's ex-girlfriend, and international thief. With the help of Ethan, Nyah manages to infiltrate the terrorist group and supplies him with important information regarding the virus.

Unfortunately, during a daring mission to recover the virus, and it's antidote, Nyah becomes infected. With the clock ticking against Hunt he must locate Sean before he can complete his plan of infecting the whole world and making billions of dollars from selling the antidote. However, Ethan must also recover the antidote before Nyah succumbs to the virus and a terrible death.

The picture is sharp with rich and vibrant colours which have an extraordinary amount of detail. There are no signs of artifacting and it has an above average bit-rate throughout the film which increases dramatically during the action scenes. It really is an impressive picture and is a vast improvement on some of the other discs released by Paramount.

You'll be glad to learn that the sound is just as good. For a start the animated menu is scored in 5.1, a rare occurrence, and things get even better from then on. The dialogue is fixed in the centre channel without any bleeding, and along with the superb amount of activity in the rear channels and plentiful LFE's it really adds up to a surround treat.

Paramount seem to have learnt their lesson in the extras department too. The extras are all presented on wonderfully animated menus and are interesting, as well as amusing. The MTV movie awards parody called "Mission Improbable" is just hilarious with Tom Cruise and Ben Stiller playing off each other brilliantly. Let's just hope that the region two edition is released with all these extras intact.

Ok, so the plot may be a little thin, but this is a visually stunning film with some truly fabulous camera work and is really a must for all John Woo fanatics. Although he does tend to over do his now famous slow motion scenes, when he does use them they are really effective. This is really highlighted when Ethan first meets with the beautiful Nyah in Spain with plenty of slow motion walking and those fabulous flamenco dancers. However, I still can't work out John Woo's fascination with Birds. Perhaps he's a bit of a pigeon fancier in his spare time?

For all of its faults you really must add this to your DVD collection. Superb!