10 Movies That Tried Way Too Hard To Be Cool

8. Mission: Impossible 2

Mission: Impossible 2 represented a major tonal and stylistic shift for the franchise, taking a sharp left-turn from Brian De Palma's grittier original - which nevertheless featured a CGI-slathered finale - and allowing action maestro John Woo to deliver one of the most hilariously nutty actioners of the early 2000s.

Woo of course made his name with his acclaimed Hong Kong action flicks starring Chow Yun-fat, such as A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled, usually working with small budgets which forced him to get creative.

But in Hollywood, Woo had money liberally thrown at him to execute every last testosterone-fuelled idea he could think of, no matter how silly.

M:I2 was actually Woo's fourth film in Hollywood but by far his most expensive, budgeted at a stonking $125 million, and the result was an almost inconceivably slick action sequel so over-the-top as to veer into self-parody.

This is a film where Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and villain Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) leap off their motorcycles and catch one another in mid-air, for Christ's sake.

Between the howlingly excessive use of slow-motion, cartoonish set-pieces, Limp Bizkit-performed title track and a bevy of plot twists layered on top of other plot twists, it can't help but feel like a comically try-hard movie that's entirely emblematic of early 2000s blockbusters.

Thankfully the subsequent sequels scaled things back somewhat, and even in their more outlandish moments have opted for a less exuberant filmmaking style.