Ranking Every "Mission: Impossible"

A gift to cinema

The Mission: Impossible movie series has been entertaining audiences worldwide for almost thirty years now. Its eighth and ostensibly final film came out a couple of months back, which gave me the idea of doing a complete runthrough of the series at home and to then finish it off with this last one in theaters.

Mission: Impossible is one of those franchises that’s been in the pop culture ether for so long that I couldn’t quite remember which of its eight films I’d watched and which ones I hadn’t, because growing up I’d always come across scenes from them in bits and pieces on TV. That said, I was keenly aware this franchise wasn’t just generic-C-tier-action-movie-slop but something genuinely good. But whether it was just James Bond / Jason Bourne / John Wick level good or something even better remained to be seen.

The thing is, I literally never watch action movies, so based on my own preferences I knew deep down that if I didn’t binge-watch these films in a lead up to the final one now, I wouldn’t bother ever watching them in my lifetime, and might miss out on some great cinema. That potential movie-FOMO was enough for me to want to forge ahead. And so I did.

The basic setup of the series is that Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt, a super spy who’s maxxed out on every trait a man can have - intelligence, agency, athletic ability, presence of mind, plot armor, you name it. Head to head he would wipe the floor with any of the other guys I mentioned above. He works for what’s called the “Impossible Mission Force (IMF)” (lol), a shadow organization of the US military with an infinite budget and cutting-edge tech straight out of science fiction, and is only called on for critical espionage missions that are considered by most to be, umm, neither realistic, nor achievable, nor probable, but something far more unlikely. Urgh, I wish there was a word to describe them.

So while these movies are connected story-wise, they can easily be (and are) enjoyed as standalone films because the basic premise of each one is usually structurally the same. Ethan Hunt gets assigned to a mission on which both his life and the fate of humanity depend on. Him and his crackpot team of fellow IMF agents then do everything they can to stop the bad guys, which usually involves:

• travelling to exotic locations around the world in cute J.Crew outfits,

• infiltrating the most secure places on earth with less effort than it takes me to log into Outlook every morning,

• getting into fistfights, knife fights, gun fights, running chases, rooftop chases, bike chases, car chases, helicopter chases, or plane chases with the villain or his goons, and,

• ending up in an absurdly difficult do-or-die situation, which only Hunt can find a solution out of, which usually involves him having to do a thing no other human is capable of.

Of course, the franchise’s real claim to fame is its sublime action sequences, and that Tom Cruise, unlike most other actors out there, performs the stunts in these sequences by himself. And when I say that “Cruise performs his own stunts”, I’m not just talking about generic action movie stuff like punching a goon in the face or shooting up a room full of people, but unbelievably insane things like hanging off the side of a plane while it takes off (!), or riding a dirt bike literally off a cliff and then parachuting down to safety (!!). And yes, I’m being very literal with my words here - in the example above he literally strapped himself to the outer side of an airplane and then hung on to it as it gradually actually took off in the air. These are just one of the blatantly dangerous things that Tom Cruise has done in real life for these movies. He’s sixty three years old.

Now you might wonder, isn’t modern VFX good enough that action sequences like these can be shot safely in front of a green screen and made to look real using CGI? Absolutely - that’s what most big budget films do. So is there really any need to actually perform these stunts on location outdoors, instead of on a green screen inside a studio? Nope. In fact it’s quite a safety risk, and involves large teams and months of preparation to ensure nothing goes wrong. Okay, but say the production crew does decide to shoot these stunts for real, is there then any need for the stunts to be performed by the movie’s lead actor himself, instead of a professional stuntman? Again, no. In fact it’s quite ill advised because an actor getting injured can delay a movie’s production by months.

So is Tom Cruise clinically insane to want to perform these genuinely dangerous stunts, on location, by himself, for every new M: I film, essentially putting his life at risk every few years?

Yes.

And we as audiences are all the better for it.

Reading all of this you might think that action inherently bores you as a genre, that it’s full of unrealistic fights carried forward with stupid plots, and who really cares how these films are made if they’re going to be so mindless and vapid? But I felt the same way. And then I blazed through this series, and while a lot of these action movie stereotypes are to some extent applicable to it as well, at their best moments these M: I films are such viscerally thrilling experiences that there’s at least a scene or two from each one that’s seared into my brain forever.

Now, to be fair, these movies aren’t particularly realistic or super deep in any way. They’re inherently quite silly, but to their credit I don’t think they’re claiming to be anything else either. They are, however, the two things they need to be: extremely well made and unabashedly fun.

One super minor detail that adds to this sense of fun is the consistent use of the series’ signature theme song. Each movie has a scene or two that essentially functions as a cold open, a la Breaking Bad, which then perfectly transitions into that banger of an opening theme and gets you hyped for what you’re about to see.

After the latest film was released and I was done watching all eight, I noticed that other fans of the series have since been posting their own rankings of these films from worst to best, and the variance in opinion has been quite stunning. As I saw these rankings I honestly started questioning if we’d seen the same set of movies, because I couldn’t believe how wrong some of their choices were. And so I decided to make my own, but looking at it now, I can’t believe mine either.

So below are my thoughts on each of the eight Mission: Impossible movies, ranked from my least to most favourite one. No major spoilers.

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08. Mission: Impossible (1996)

dir. Brian De Palma, 1st in series

The original and self-titled Mission: Impossible is a good movie that I somehow don’t gel with at all. It’s quite clever, full of plot twists and cool spy stuff, but there’s just something a bit wobbly about it that I can’t quite put my finger on. Everything about it, from the dialogue to the pacing to the cinematography, feels choppy and uneven to me, and I didn’t really enjoy it as much as most people do, who rank it generally quite high.

To me, the most interesting thing about this movie now is how distant it feels from the series it would eventually spawn. It has the vibe of a forgotten 90’s spy flick more than anything else. Had I seen it back when it came out - granted, I wasn’t born till a few months later - I would never in a million years have expected a three-decade-long behemoth of an action franchise to come out of it. The fact that it did says everything you need to know about Cruise’s tenacity as a producer and his endurance as an A-list movie star.

Worth watching if: you’re either really into spy movies or want to see the genesis of this franchise.

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07. Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)

dir. John Woo, 2nd in series

M: I 2 is objectively the worst film in the series and often finds itself at the bottom spot on most people’s rankings. But as we’re going to see, my rankings are anything but objective.

M: I 2 is the only movie I’ve ever seen that is actually quite bad for its first two acts and then somehow miraculously redeems itself in its third act. (That is, once they get to the storage facility on the island.) I've literally never seen a movie switch up so much in quality and I was glad I stuck through.

The action in the third act - the takedowns, the pigeons flying, the vehicle chase, the hand-to-hand boss fight, all amplified by a high octane score - is so freaking baller that it makes me forget all the crap that came before it. I shit you not, there’s a moment in here where Cruise is speeding on a bike while another rider shoots at him, both of them charging towards each other from opposite ends, and he dodges those bullets by jumping off his bike but not letting go of the handle, standing next to it while still in motion to shield himself, and then getting back on once the threat has passed. I'm a simple guy: if a movie has something as objectively cool as that moment it's automatically a good movie. Sorry I ever doubted you, John Woo.

M: I 2 is also by far the most Bollywood-coded American film I've ever seen. It's now apparent who all the Indian action movie directors of the mid-2000's were “borrowing” their ideas from. There's a few shots in here that I swear have been photocopied into Dhoom. Bollywood's plagiarism is like Hermione Granger’s bag: bottomless.

So in spite of its flaws I find this to be superior to the original M: I just because it has higher highs. Cruise even has a better haircut in this one.

(Fun fact: the actor who plays the villain here was originally cast as the first choice to play Wolverine in X-Men, but dropped out of it to star in this movie instead, and so the X-Men producers went ahead with an unknown actor named Hugh Jackman for that role.)

Worth watching if: you can somehow skip to the last half hour and view it as a short action film.

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06. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (2023)

dir. Christopher McQuarrie, 7th in series

For our sixth entry we jump way ahead into 2023. Originally titled Dead Reckoning Part One, this is the second-last film of the franchise and the third directed by Christopher McQuarrie.

This movie had quite a bit of bad luck. It got screwed during production by COVID-19, which resulted in multiple production difficulties and months of delays - check out this leaked audio of Cruise yelling at crew members who weren’t following COVID protocols on set (though I think he was completely right here) - and once released it then got screwed at the box office due to the Barbenheimer hype and flew under most people’s radar.

All in all it’s a pretty decent movie, but in just about every aspect is still a huge step down from the previous three entries in the franchise, two of which were directed by McQuarrie himself. (Like, how did you forget how to cook your own recipes, bro?) One weird thing about this series is that every single M: I film has been longer than the previous one, and at a whopping 163 minutes, Dead Reckoning is where the bloat really starts to show. And because the movie introduces a bunch of new characters but is also meant to be the first of a two-part storyline, everything about it feels simultaneously too much yet inherently incomplete.

Of course, this is the film with the legendary stunt where Cruise literally rides a dirt bike off the edge of a mountain and then parachutes out of it down to safety. (The in-story reason for this is that Ethan Hunt needs to get inside a moving train to save someone, and time is ticking out, and it’s the only way how.) This scene is one of the craziest things to ever happen in an M: I film - actually, in any film ever made - and is by far its biggest (only?) highlight. This behind-the-scenes video showing how that stunt was set up and shot is an absolute must-watch, and has more tension in it than most action films do. In fact you could say that that video is better than this movie itself.

Because Dead Reckoning is so long and because it's highly dependent on both its predecessors and successor to work, it feels like the least independent film in the franchise, and the one least likely to be watched by people in the future.

Worth watching if: you’ve made it this far into the series and really want to finish it off, or if you really want to see the final movie. (If nothing else you should at least watch the cliff jump video linked above, I swear it’s worth it.)

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05. Mission: Impossible III (2006)

dir. J. J. Abrams, 3rd in series

After having mixed feelings about both 1 and 2, III was the first Mission: Impossible I watched that felt like a complete movie with solid footing.

M: I III was the directorial film debut of Lost veteran J. J. Abrams, who’d go on to have a huge career after this and eventually direct one Star Trek and two Star Wars movies, so I guess you have Cruise and Co. to thank (read: blame) for that.

Abrams does a good job here, but one aspect in which this is the clearly the franchise’s worst film is its visual look. He makes every frame look grainy, he zooms in way too close to his actors’ faces during conversational scenes, and he relies way too much on handheld shots. These creative choices do give the film a more raw and intense vibe, which I think is what he was going for, but do make it look, well, bad.

On the positive side, M: I III does have the single best cold opening of the series and what’s got to be one of the best opening scenes in all of cinema.

Of course, aside from all that the film is now known for one thing only - the Kanye song in the end credits. Kidding, it’s for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as the arms dealer, Owen Davian, who kidnaps Ethan’s wife and plays psychological games with him throughout the film. He is by far the franchise’s best villain and its only truly great performance. This lack of a compelling antagonist was really felt in later films.

M: I III made me realize how little I understand acting as a skill, because Hoffman manages to somehow be utterly compelling without doing anything over the top. He doesn’t even have a lot of screentime here, really, but every time he is on screen you can’t look away. I honestly can’t tell what he specifically did as an actor to bring so much gravitas to this role - it feels almost like a magic trick. RIP.

Worth watching if: you want a solid action movie with a riveting villain.

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04. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)

dir. Christopher McQuarrie, 5th in series

Now we’re onto the really good ones.

Rogue Nation is the fifth film in the series and the first directed by Christopher McQuarrie. What’s interesting is that until Rogue Nation, every M: I film had had a different director, each of whom had left their own stylistic mark on their entry. But sometime around the early 2010’s McQuarrie became Cruise’s go-to collaborator for literally everything and thus took over this series as well, directing every one of its films from hereon till the end. Though I would’ve liked to see some other filmmakers’ version of an M: I film I think this worked out quite well.

Rogue Nation is a smooth, slick ride whose only sin is that strangely front-loads all of its best action sequences within the first half, and then keeps the climax relatively lowkey, which feels like a baffling screenwriting choice for a Mission: Impossible film. It has the weakest third act of any entry in the franchise since maybe the first one, which is the one thing you don't want out of these movies - you always expect them to end with a bang. All of this makes the movie feel less mission-impossible-esque and more like a straightforward action thriller, which isn’t bad in itself, per se, but feels subversive in the wrong way.

But that one nitpick aside, man, what a banger. This is the one where Cruise hangs off of a plane flying at 5,000 feet (unimaginably dangerous), the one with a three-way assassination attempt, a cool underwater sequence, a femme fatale, tons of espionage and mind games, and a highway bike chase that both surpasses the one in M: I 2 and feels so visceral you’re actually scared for everyone involved.

Rogue Nation also has the distinction of having the only good poster out of all movies in the franchise. Just about everything about it has that sheen of quality; it’s all exceedingly well done and I can’t imagine someone not coming away impressed.

Worth watching if: you need a calm, cool, sexy action flick that knows exactly what it’s about.

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03. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)

dir. Brad Bird, 4th in series

Ghost Protocol is the fourth Mission: Impossible movie and was a major turning point for the franchise. It’s as close to a complete revamp/reboot/reinvention as I’ve seen any long-running series do, while still keeping the same characters and moving the overall story forward with them.

It marked a huge shift for the franchise going forward in every aspect: the tone, storytelling, aesthetics, as well as the scale of its action sequences and the difficulty of stunt work required. Something must’ve snapped in Cruise around this time that made him want to pivot fully from a character actor to the adrenaline-junkie-action-star we know him as to this day.

Once you watch GP you realize you can divide the franchise into two eras: BGP (movies 1 to 3) and AGP (movies 4 to 8), with the AGP films having been seemingly made in Ghost Protocol’s image, with a more modern look, smoother dialogue, and a much larger scope and budget.

Directed by Brad Bird in his live action debut - this is the animation GOAT who made both The Incredibles and Ratatouille - Ghost Protocol is a fantastic film rife with Bird’s signature kinetic energy and an easy sense of movement that he brings from previous films. It’s also the “most” of all the M: I films, in the sense that it seems to stuff the most amount of movie within its runtime than anything else I’ve seen. It’s honestly unbelievable how many things happen in this and how quickly it all goes by. (It’s just like life itself!) Once you finish watching it you feel completely exhausted in the best possible way.

Ghost Protocol also has the best “they said the title of the movie in the movie” moment of this franchise, as well as a ton of behind-the-scenes drama in which the producers wanted this to be Cruise’s last M: I film - with Jeremy Renner as a potential successor - and the initial script was written accordingly, but when McQuarrie was brought on as a last minute script-doctor he immediately decided that there would be no impossible missions without Tom Cruise in them. What a great professional meet cute story.

Anyways, because the story (in the movie) has the highest stakes so far, it does get a bit too glib with the plot and asks for copious suspension of disbelief from its audience, even by the franchise’s own standards. But that’s a small price to pay to get incredible sequence after sequence packed into just over two hours of runtime. You have, in order: a prison break, an espionage mission inside the Kremlin followed by its bombing, the iconic Burj Khalifa sequence, a two-way handover bluff (my favourite scene), an incredible blind chase through a desert sandstorm, and a climax that somehow involves a seduction, a jump on top of a large fan, and a fistfight inside a multi-floor parking garage, all of which lead to a down-to-the-wire ending that had me on the absolute edge of my seat.

Of course, this movie is most famous for the scene in which Tom Cruise climbed onto the side of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which I remember became a huge point of marketing for the film that everybody was talking about when it came out. In fact I’d guess that it might be the one thing people who’ve never seen any of these films know about the franchise. And rightfully so, since it was the beginning of the sort of insane theatrics and stunt work that would become Cruise’s signature going forward.

I also remember this movie was heavily marketed in India because the ending was shot there and because Anil Kapoor is in it - he’s pretty funny in this, actually - and so the poster feels a bit nostalgic because it was on billboards everywhere that year and reminds me of school.

Worth watching if: you a) love tall buildings, b) worship at the altar of Brad Bird, c) are a fan of Welcome, or d) have ever downloaded the Jeremy Renner App.

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02. Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

dir. Christopher McQuarrie, 6th in series

I don’t have too much to say about Fallout except that it might genuinely be the greatest action movie ever made.

To be fair, Fallout is equally if not more cartoonishly over-the-top than every other Mission: Impossible that came before it. And while it has the same general tone and story beats as the previous films, it manages to scale up its sense of spectacle and bombast to such intense highs you’re left a bit flabbergasted at the end.

You have in this movie a High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) jump, an intense and violent three way fistfight in a restroom (the one with that iconic shot of Henry Cavill “reloading” his arms), a chaotic bike chase through the crowded streets of Paris, the best Tom Cruise running sequence ever (that too across building rooftops, because running on the street is too mainstream), and of course, a climax involving two helicopters in which Cruise climbs up a rope on a flying copter, pilots it, and then chases Cavill in the air in order to get hold of a bomb detonator while Cavill tries to shoot back at him with a machine gun. Yup.

And, of course, it’s all real. I don’t know how but it is. Cruise apparently trained for and then practiced a HALO jump 106 times across several months (!) just to finally shoot three takes that were usable. (I used to think that The Social Network’s 99-take-opening-scene story was crazy, but this outdoes it.)

For the Paris chase he biked across the Arc de Triomphe against the flow of traffic, all of which were actual cars driven by extras who had to be careful not to hit him as he rode right past them.

The famous scene where he wobbles back up after having jumped between two rooftops happened because he actually broke his ankle during the jump, thus shutting down production for months, and they used that very take with his broken ankle in the movie.

The entire helicopter chase sequence at the end was filmed fully practically and on location in New Zealand. Cruise first obtained a helicopter pilot’s license and trained for a year just to be able to pilot the chasing helicopter himself. The crew then choreographed the whole chase sequence, the aerial maneuvers involved, and shot it using multiple copters deep in the mountains. No wonder it looks so good.

To call this stuff crazy would be an understatement. You just have to watch this movie, man, I don’t know what else to say.

Worth watching if: you have eyes.

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01. Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025)

dir. Christopher McQuarrie, 8th and last in series

The Final Reckoning, the latest and final Mission: Impossible film, came out just a couple of months ago and thus concluded both this franchise and my binge watch of it.

Upon release the movie received generally positive but not glowing reviews. It didn’t get the kind of universal acclaim the franchise once had with Fallout, nor did it dominate the online Twitter/Letterboxd discourse for too long, nor did most of my friends see it, and nor did it do too well at the box office.

After I watched it the response seemed understandable. This is a clunky hot mess of a film that runs way too long, has way more characters than it can balance, and generally feels bizarrely paced and edited. It’s very apparent that they test screened and Frankensteined the shit out of this.

The reason for a lot of these creative choices is that the previous movie, Dead Reckoning, was supposed to directly set up the events in this film but massively underperformed at the box office. And so in order to maximise viewership, McQ and Co pivoted hard during this movie’s post-production and completely re-edited it, so as to now make it function as a standalone entry, so much so that even someone who’s never seen an single M: I movie could follow along.

(In fact I learned through this excellent interview that they added a new cold open into the movie two days before locking picture. And I thought I was a do-things-last-minute kinda guy.)

This pivot came at a cost. It’s why TFR’s first act is spent setting up and repeating plot points already previously established, why the movie ends up with a whopping three hour runtime, and why the only thing that characters in this movie do is exposition. They’re always explaining their situation and re-hashing their plans, as if the film is terrified the audience is going to forget what’s happening at any given moment.

Generally this movie feels fundamentally insecure and simply does not have the calm sophistication of previous entries like Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation.

And yet.

In spite of its very many flaws The Final Reckoning just so happens to be the greatest theatrical experience I’ve ever had in my life. Watching it on an AMC Dolby screen, I was completely at the film’s mercy, reacting to every little thing and holding back my need to yell at the screen every few minutes. For a good while after I got out I was literally tweaking, man, I was vibrating with a different kind of energy. That experience is what made me want to write this piece in the first place.

The Final Reckoning basically continues the story of Dead Reckoning and rests on the shoulders of two major sequences: a 20-minute long underwater sequence where Ethan Hunt needs to dive into a sunken submarine to retrieve a piece of equipment, and then a sequence at the end where Hunt needs to chase down the villain who has something he needs and is escaping away on a flying biplane.

I’ve repeatedly talked above about how this franchise is built upon ambitious set pieces and dangerous stunt work, but TFR outdoes itself even by the franchise’s own standards. The submarine sequence, because it’s one long score-less scene that doesn’t cut away to anything else, has this quiet, hypnotic intensity about it I rarely see in any kind of movie, and especially not a Mission: Impossible one. And the biplane sequence, in which Hunt climbs onto his enemy’s plane and gets into a fight with him while the plane is in the air, is so viscerally terrifying, so outrageously, mind-blowingly insane, it’s straight up some of the craziest stuff I’ve ever witnessed with my own eyes inside or outside of a movie theater.

I never take photos in a theater but WTF IS THIS?!?!

And as always you could create an entire movie out of the making of this one alone, complete with footage of Tom Cruise hanging off the wing of a flying plane in real life, and holding on to it as the plane inverts while in the air, because at this point we’ve accepted that that is simply what Tom Cruise does. His vanity, the blurring of his and Ethan Hunt's personas, his savior complex combined with his willingness to literally risk his life for these films... Say what you will about him and McQuarrie, but these are the kind of insane perfectionists who end up pushing the boundaries of their chosen artform more than anyone else. The fact that these scenes were even conceived of, let alone executed so well, feels like the crossing of some kind of a Rubicon within action movies as an artform.

Now, while I do love these scenes I also did just complain a lot about this movie, so does having two great scenes make TFR the very best Mission: Impossible movie? Honestly… no. And would it have ended up in my top spot here if I hadn’t experienced it on the big screen? Again, probably not. Even to me it feels somehow wrong to have this movie at number one. But the experience I had watching it was so gratifying that it just felt wronger to have it anywhere else.

And that’s precisely the point. Movies aren’t objective works of art that feel the same no matter how and where and when you watch them. The circumstances in which you watch one matters. The medium is the message. It’s not a coincidence that the only two films in this franchise that I’ve seen in theaters are at my top two spots here.

I used to think that catching a film while it was in theaters was a bonus, but The Final Reckoning made me realize that the theatrical experience is almost essential, and that by watching a film any other way you’re compromising your experience of it, which seems pretty on point since its star has been the biggest advocate of movie theaters for a while now. It just took some time for me to catch up.

Worth watching if: you can somehow get rich enough to one day own a mansion and then build your own movie theater inside it and then watch The Final Reckoning in there. I’ve been hearing rumors that if you ever play this on your 13-inch MacBook Tom Cruise personally barges into your house and throws it out of the window.