How John Woo’s ‘Mission: Impossible 2’ shaped modern Bollywood

The film, which was released in the United States on May 24, 2000, wouldn’t hit Indian screens until September of that year, where it would go on to gross more than three times what its predecessor made. It played for 13 weeks and would eventually become a frequent fixture of English-language TV channels. Fast forward 25 years, and most mainstream Hindi action movies seem to bear the signature of the Hong Kong maestro. Of course, there’s no linear formula to determine cultural influence. Woo’s style was well-known by the time he worked with Cruise—thanks to shoot-em-ups like The Killer, Hardboiled and Face/Off—and mainstream Indian cinema has long borrowed ideas from numerous sources. But upon revisiting M:I 2, it’s hard not to recognize what would become the Bollywood action playbook in subsequent years, especially when it came to action tableaus expanding time and motion, in order to make flowing-haired action subjects seem like the coolest motherf*ckers on the planet.

Cruise, a producer on the series, was responsible for bringing Woo on board, and for retaining the movie’s death-defying early sequence, in which his character Ethan Hunt dangles from a cliff—a scene the studio wanted to cut. Right from the word go, as Hunt leaps from one steep ledge to another in slow-motion, time and gravity are no longer an object. Soon after, a thumping nu metal version of the series’ theme music performed by Limp Bitzkit paves the path for a much more audacious entry than its understated, claustrophobic successor. Where Mission: Impossible director Brian De Palma drew on Hitchcock thrillers and classic heist movies, Woo leaned further into his gonzo, maximalist approach, which infuses movement and violence with a sense of wistful romance. The result is sexual tension between Tom Cruise and Thandiwe Newton embodied by their cars circling around one another at full speed, and a climactic shootout between Hunt and doppelganger villain Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) that culminates in a flaming bike collision, as their bodies meet in mid-air. Stunt teams may have shot and performed these scenes, but it feels like a poet wrote them.

Outside of these scenes—many of them shot at sunset—the rest of the movie leaves much to be desired (it can be a dialogue-heavy slog). However, the moments themselves are some of the coolest, moodiest, most captivating images ever put to film. At this point in Hindi cinema, action was often relegated to minor hand-to-hand combat, or shootouts at a distance; technology and intimacy would seldom overlap. That is, until the 2004 smash-hit Dhoom, a bike-centric heist series that would go on to spawn two massive sequels during the following decade. From the way its bikes are shot in motion, zipping across sunsets, to the way the movie slows down to focus on the long mane of high-tech antagonist Kabir Sharma (John Abraham) flowing in the wind, it’s hard not to see Woo’s fingerprints all over the first Dhoom movie—which would itself begin to influence Bollywood’s action. Its sequel, Dhoom 2 (2006), would even feature a villain— Hrithik Roshan’s mysterious “Mr. A”—whose specialty was elaborate disguises, not unlike the numerous convincing rubber masks seen in the Mission: Impossible films.