Until this past weekend, I’d never seen a “Mission: Impossible” movie in my life. This fact had a sort of shock and awe effect on the rest of the Jalops, most notably Andy and Daniel, who demanded I remedy this egregious failing posthaste. So I got my hands on all the films, watched the first three, and I’ve developed a take based on what I’ve seen so far: “Mission: Impossible 2” has the absolute funniest motorcycle chase scene I’ve ever seen.
The chase comes right at the climax of the movie, as Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) races on a Triumph Speed Triple 955i away from Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) on a Triumph Daytona 955i, and towards the youngest Thandiwe Newton anyone’s ever seen. The chase leads both bikes down some Australian highway, before turning off into the dirt — at which point both sporty Triumphs suddenly sprout knobby, offroad tires. It’s extremely noticeable, incredibly funny, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
The bikes on pavement
The thing about “M:I-2” is that it’s quite possibly the most John Woo movie ever made. The director is pulling out all the stops here, and that includes a lot of closeups of the bikes’ wheels skidding and sliding. It also means a lot of acrobatic motorcycle maneuvers on the part of Tom Cruise, all of which should have led to a highside, but that’s a whole other topic. All those slides, though, give us plenty of time to look at the tread patterns on the Triumphs’ rubber.
Paramount Pictures
These are very clearly street tires! You could make the argument that the Daytona is on some sort of 90-10 rubber, which is itself a fascinating choice for the full-fairing bike compared to the sport tires on the naked Street Triple, but the whole island compound in the film could reasonably have some hardpack roads that would justify this. God’s in his heaven, all’s right with these two motorcycles.
The bikes on dirt
Until they leave pavement, that is. Both bikes are suddenly clad in dirtworthy tires, which is a very reasonable move to make from the production end — if you’re doing stunts with these bikes off-road, you want them to be controllable by your actors or stunt riders. The motorcycles having dirt tires here isn’t the problem, the problem is that we keep getting John Woo’s closeups of what the wheels are doing. There’s no camera trickery, no smoke and mirrors to hide anything, the movie makes it extremely obvious when the bikes switch to whatever the year 2000 version of a Continental TKC70 was.
Paramount Pictures
The Daytona is an even worse offender here, with its back tire going full paddle to get through the sand. It always had a slightly more aggressive tread than the Striple, but nowhere in the on-road portions of this chase did that rear ever look like this. Again, the closeups on the bike really show off how much the tire’s changed. It’s just so funny to see this showed off so blatantly, something that in modern cinema would probably be airbrushed away with CGI. In a way, it’s nice to have these little reminders that the things on film were real back then (and thankfully in the newer M:I movies they still are). It’s just also hilarious.
