10 Movie Sequels That Pointlessly Took Away Things Fans Loved

8. The Classy Spy Thriller Tone - Mission: Impossible II

Giving the sequel to a hit movie a starkly different tone is an incredibly risky move that's exceptionally difficult to get right. For every Aliens, Terminator 2, or more recently, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, there are countless examples of failed tone-shifting follow-ups.

Perhaps the most interesting and, frankly, ridiculous example to date is Mission: Impossible II.

Arriving some four years after Brian De Palma's more measured 1996 spy thriller, the sequel stripped away most of the original's espionage and tradecraft elements for a shamelessly stupid, wildly over-budgeted blockbuster effort from action film maestro John Woo.

With heaps of slow-motion, an impossibly convoluted plot, and a title theme performed by Limp Bizkit, it felt totally counter to the throwback spy yarn style of the original. It just couldn't look any more like an early 2000s action flick if it tried, basically.

And though Mission: Impossible II can certainly be enjoyed as a braindead exercise in style-over-substance, the sequels thankfully returned to the classier spy film inclinations of the original film, while taking a slightly more plausible approach to the action sequences than Woo did.