Every ‘Mission: Impossible’ Movie, Ranked

This is it — the final reckoning. All two hours and 51 minutes of it. In what has been billed for years as Cruise’s last hurrah, Ethan Hunt has finally become a superhero who is the only thing standing between humanity and total nuclear annihilation, which is something that happened before in his career. This is the most sentimental film in the series, and it tries to tie all the movies together with a single bow, semi-successfully. It would have been a delight to see the return of old IMF boss Laurence Fishburne or the onetime heir to the Mission: Impossible franchise, Jeremy Renner, but no dice. Instead, we get a few flashbacks to the old days and a satisfying redemption arc for a character we haven’t seen since 1996. Oh yeah, and more Kittridge. Baddie Esai Morales should have been given more to do than glower and cackle, and the Entity – the formal name of the evil A.I. (aren’t they all?) —  could have been more… interesting? Had a more memorable voice? The Final Reckoning is clichés inside clichés, and every countdown clock and ultimatum and stunt feels like it’s all been done before. And yet, it’s impossible not to smile while watching sixtysomething Cruise hang off a biplane soaring upside down.

This is the franchise’s most maligned movie, but for many a favorite, flaws and all. Legendary Hong Kong action director John Woo was brought in to inject Cruise’s sequel with his trademark chaotic style. This mission is full of Woo’s famous flourishes, from excessive slow-motion to ridiculous, physics-defying fight choreography to flocks of birds fluttering for no good reason. It is these excesses that earned Mission: Impossible II its reputation as the worst movie in the series. The criticism is fair. Cruise unleashes far too many dramatic flying spin-kicks, for instance. And then there’s the gunplay. Woo loves to capture men soaring through the air while unloading twin 9mms. After Mission: Impossible II, Hunt’s use of handguns greatly diminishes. But this movie has one of the best openers, Cruise free-climbing up the side of a butte in Utah. Thandiwe Newton is the love interest, and her role is, well, dated: She’s a master thief used as bait to hook her ex, the bad guy. Newton is a tremendous actor who almost has chemistry with Cruise. This movie embraces action more than skullduggery, and the entire last act is insane, including a final exhausting fight on the beach between hero and villain. But Tom Cruise riding a motorcycle through flames? Iconic. M:I-2 also features the best one-liner in the series, delivered by an uncredited Anthony Hopkins as a testy IMF boss. After Hunt affirms that his new mission is “difficult,” Sir Tony retorts: “Well, this is not mission difficult, Mr. Hunt, it’s mission impossible. ‘Difficult’ should be a walk in the park for you.”

Television powerhouse J.J. Abrams was brought in to direct and save the Mission: Impossible franchise, and he did it the same way he would rescue Star Trek’s cinematic fortunes in 2009 — by understanding what made each TV series click. Abrams’ sequel, first and foremost, surrounds Cruise’s Hunt with a competent IMF team — the main villains in the first two movies were IMF turncoats. Mission: Impossible III also marks the debut of Simon Pegg as Hunt’s wisecracking British sidekick, a welcome bit of casting. Multiple action scenes stand out, including a thrilling Vatican City break-in and a memorable man-versus-missile scene on a bridge. The plot revolves around the best MacGuffin in the series: the Rabbit Foot. What does it do? Nobody knows, but everyone wants it. (The Rabbit Foot will be retconned for no good reason later in the series.) What makes this movie special is its villain, Owen Davian, a cruel, cold-blooded arms dealer, played by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. Hoffman is intense and dead-eyed, especially in the movie’s opening scene, where he threatens Hunt’s wife, an excellent Michelle Monaghan, with a gun to her head. It’s a chilling scene, and Hoffman is so good that he pulls a vulnerable performance out of Cruise, one of his best.

Here’s where the Mission: Impossible series really starts to cook. This entry is more confident than any of the previous ones, and it opens with one of the most impressive stunts of the entire series: Cruise hangs off the side of an Airbus A400M transport plane that takes off and soars almost 8,000 feet over the English countryside. Yes, he’s securely attached — but also he’s outside the damn plane. It’s a funny double-shot of adrenaline and the rest of the movie is just as fun. The formidable Rebecca Ferguson is introduced as a former British secret agent, an ally, and a sort-of love interest. There’s a brief escape scene where a handcuffed Hunt shimmies up and off a pole before fighting for his life — a great flash of Cruise’s athleticism. Hunt and company fight assassins during a performance of Puccini’s Turandot at the Vienna State Opera, an elegant setting for a face-off. Rogue Nation is also the movie in which Cruise flaunts his superhuman lungs: He holds his breath for six minutes during a terrifying underwater break-in, four minutes longer than your average Navy SEAL. Alec Baldwin is another IMF chief who gets a chance to extoll Hunt’s virtues to a foreign head of state, calling him, among other things, the “living manifestation of destiny.” It’s a hilarious tribute that leads to a big reveal. This is a hugely rewatchable movie. Let’s not forget the mysterious villains: the Syndicate, a sort of evil Impossible Mission Force. Don’t they sound dangerous?

Another great opening: Hunt breaks out of a Russian prison with the help of the IMF. Directed by animator/Pixar whiz Brad Bird (who helmed 1999’s fantasy heartbreaker The Iron Giant) this is a sleek, smart, funny Mission: Impossible movie. The centerpiece of Ghost Protocol is Tom Cruise climbing up the side of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest skyscraper in the world. Our man Hunt is on a timer — he’s got to break into a server room from the outside of the building. Objectively, it’s probably the best stunt in the series, though you can get vertigo just thinking about it. Ghost Protocol also gifts us with a Kremlin infiltration that leans on disguises and gizmos and ends with a brutal act of terrorism and Cruise escaping from a Russian hospital (there’s lots of Russia stuff in the franchise, post-Cold War nostalgia). In Ghost Protocol, the IMF’s fabled gadgets are constantly glitching, which is an excellent bit that really elevates the stakes. Bird’s only Mission: Impossible movie is a well-oiled machine that charges forward from the get-go, but it’s also occasionally quirky. This is the beginning of naming Mission: Impossible movies like they’re popular first shooter video games, successfully merging two popular Venn diagram circles: shut-ins and dads.

The second-worst movie genre is “big-screen TV show adaptations.” (The first? Live-action remakes of Disney movies.) There are dozens of mediocre examples, but beloved thriller director Brian De Palma — one of the most underrated filmmakers of the Seventies New Hollywood movement — is responsible for the two best small-screen-to-big-screen adaptations ever made: 1987’s Oscar winner The Untouchables and Mission: Impossible. In the former, De Palma knew he was telling a rip-roaring cops-and-robbers adventure set in Prohibition-era Chicago. He also knew that the Mission: Impossible series, which originally ran from 1966-73 on CBS, was a show about competent daredevils who use disguises and smarts to steal secrets and stop madmen. De Palma made a twisty spy whodunit complete with double-crosses and moles and a shocking post-opening credit sequence where — spoiler — the IMF team is killed. He was the perfect director to launch this franchise and Tom Cruise the perfect star. At this point in his career, Cruise had little to prove. He was a cocky leading man with a Best Actor Oscar nom for 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July. But his heart’s desire was to be an action star. He succeeded, to say the least. The defining scene in the entire series is, arguably, Cruise breaking into CIA headquarters and dangling from a pair of cords inside a high-tech vault. It’s a proverbial nail-biter without any violence — just Cruise being graceful without triggering multiple alarms, including a touch-sensitive floor. The movie ends on a spectacular, special-effects-laden fight on a speeding train. De Palma perfected a storytelling recipe in this first Mission: Impossible that has been tweaked over the decades but never really improved upon. The movie is a tech nerd’s dream, even if the tech here is pure pre-digital Nineties computer gear (floppy disks figure prominently). Mission: Impossible also introduced two game-changing cloak-and-dagger tools: futuristic glasses that do everything except make it easier to read small print and lifelike rubber masks. Oh, the masks. The best part of every Mission: Impossible is when one character rips off his face to reveal its Hunt or on rare occasions, a villain — one of the most iconic running gags in pop culture. This is the one that started it all.

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.