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Every ‘Mission: Impossible’ Movie, Ranked

The epic saga of Tom Cruise running through fields, over roofs, and down streets has come to a close. Here’s how the eight films stack up, from Mission: Inert to Mission: Incredible

Mission: Impossible movies

Everett Collection; Skydance/Paramount; Everett Collection

With the release of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, one of cinema’s great action franchises is (allegedly) winding down. Over 29 years, it has delivered more than 18 hours of expensive big-screen mayhem: explosions and car crashes and handsome Tom Cruise hanging off the skids of helicopters. The action sequences in these movies are amazing. Impeccably choreographed and executed.

Everything else, not so much.

The Mission: Impossible movies do not represent a well-plotted universe like Marvel or Star Wars, nor are they consistently excellent. The dialogue ping-pongs between bland quips and breathless exposition. The plots are almost identical: A supervillain has stolen or is hunting some deadly MacGuffin, which was Alfred Hitchcock’s word for a thing that everyone wants. There are scenes in all the Mission: Impossible movies where nothing happens, and scenes where everything happens. And that’s fine. Once the fuse is lit and Lalo Schifrin’s iconic theme music kicks in, you’re into whatever comes next, whether it’s mediocre or jaw-dropping.

While a few actors make repeated appearances — most notably Simon Pegg as comic relief Benji and Ving Rhames as Luther, the coolest hacker in Hollywood history, these movies are about one person and one person only: secret agent-slash-messiah Ethan Hunt, played by Tom Cruise. He’s like James Bond, if Bond dressed down like a tech bro and drank Red Bull. The character exists in an inoffensive political dimension where the U.S. government is run by bumbling doofuses and well-meaning bureaucrats who depend on Ethan Hunt and his team of aging freelancers to save the world repeatedly.

So which of these movies achieves the best mix of impenetrable technobabble, global chaos, and Tom Cruise’s choppers? Here, they’re ranked according to how each serves the core mission of Mission: Impossible, which is to carpet-bomb audiences with pulse-pounding derring-do as they snack on popcorn in the dark.

1

Mission: Impossible — Fallout (2018)

It took eight tries and hundreds of millions of dollars to produce one nearly perfect Mission: Impossible movie that balances beautiful locales, near-perfect action set pieces, and Tom Cruise’s perfect teeth. Fallout has the best-in-show motorcycle race in the franchise, beating out Mission: Impossible II’s roaring two-wheel chase. Fun Fallout trivia: Apparently, production had to design a special face mask for Cruise to wear during his absolutely bonkers real-life HALO jump out of the back of a C-17 transport 25,000 feet in the air. Most face masks cover the mouth and nose of the parachutist, but Fallout needed to see Cruise’s mug — what’s the point of doing your own stunts if no one can recognize you? The best fistfight happens in Fallout, too, in a club’s white, pristine bathroom. It’s a brutal melee — the punches in most of these movies are cartoonish, but this scene is pure pain. (Later, Ferguson and Pegg get involved in a donnybrook that is also pretty savage.) Fallout gives us two villains: menacing, raspy-voiced Sean Harris as the head of the Syndicate and a mustachioed assassin played by Henry Cavill, whose muscular arms are loaded with shotgun shells. He’s an excellent jerk. During the climax, there’s a high-speed helicopter chase through the mountains of Kashmir, and Cruise is plainly behind the flight controls. He’s actually piloting the helicopter, a skill he learned over three months on set. It’s peak Cruise, which means Fallout is peak Mission: Impossible.