Mission: Impossible 2

The clearest skip in the series, and it costs you nothing: no character introduced here recurs, no plot thread carries forward, and the next film opens on an Ethan Hunt who might as well have come straight from the first.

It is also the strangest thing with this title on it. John Woo was hired and allowed to make an entirely John Woo film, which means doves, standoffs with two pistols, slow motion applied to almost everything including people turning around, and a final act that abandons the plot in favour of a motorcycle joust followed by a fist fight on a beach. The identity masks, used sparingly in the first film, are here used so often that it becomes impossible to care who anybody is.

Robert Towne's script is a loose reworking of Notorious: a thief is recruited to seduce her former partner, who now has a stolen virus, and the film is much more interested in the triangle than in the mission. Thandiwe Newton is good and the part is written as an object to be traded between two men.

What it does have is the cliff. The opening has Tom Cruise free-climbing in Utah with the safety rigging removed in post, and it is the moment the series' real selling point was discovered: a famous actor visibly doing something dangerous. Everything good about the next six films comes out of that one sequence. It was the highest-grossing film of 2000 and it is the one nobody revisits.