Over the past couple of decades, the Mission: Impossible franchise has gone from strength to strength. It kicked off as a series of straightforward spy thrillers – Hollywood’s answer to the James Bond franchise – but it’s since morphed into a beast of its own. Starting with the fourth movie, Ghost Protocol, the Mission: Impossible franchise has become a showcase for the death-defying stunt work of its star, Tom Cruise.
Cruise has scaled the facade of the tallest building in the world, hung off the side of a plane as it took off, and broken a bone jumping from one rooftop to another in the name of his audience’s entertainment. Some Mission: Impossible movies, like the action-packed Fallout, warrant a lot more rewatches than others, like the muddled Mission: Impossible 2.
Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)
The second Mission: Impossible movie was directed by John Woo, a legend of action cinema, and he didn’t hold back on making it a John Woo movie. Mission: Impossible 2 has all the stylized gun violence and slow-motion doves that Woo’s fans have come to expect from his movies.
While Woo brings plenty of explosive spectacle to the table, Mission: Impossible 2 was panned by critics. It’s a classic example of style with no substance. None of the M:I movies have airtight plotting, but the second one is easily the most jumbled and disjointed of the bunch.
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)
Christopher McQuarrie’s first of what will eventually be four Mission: Impossible movies (in a franchise where no other filmmaker even came back for a second movie), Rogue Nation, makes a fatal error in the first few moments of its runtime. The movie gets off to a jaw-dropping start with one of the most breathtaking stunts in the entire franchise. After failing to extract some cargo the easy way, Ethan Hunt clings to the side of a plane during take-off.
This opening scene is so spectacular that nothing in the rest of the movie can top it. There are some other fun set-pieces in Rogue Nation, like a motorcycle chase and an underwater infiltration, but none of these sequences come close to topping the thrill of Cruise hanging off a plane as it takes flight.
Mission: Impossible III (2006)
J.J. Abrams jumped in at the deep end with his directorial debut. For his first feature, Abrams didn’t scrape together a small budget for a character-driven chamber piece; he took a $150 million budget from a major Hollywood studio to helm one of their big tentpole blockbusters. Mission: Impossible III is a more or less generic action thriller, one movie before the series became defined by Cruise’s daring stunts, but it’s still pretty exciting.
Philip Seymour Hoffman is, by far, the greatest villain the franchise has seen. Owen Davian could’ve been a one-note role – he’s an arms dealer seeking a vaguely defined MacGuffin known as the “Rabbit’s Foot” – but Hoffman elevates it.
Mission: Impossible (1996)
The great Brian De Palma started the franchise off on a good foot with the first Mission: Impossible movie. Given how far-fetched the sequels have gotten, the 1996 original is now remembered as the most grounded entry in the series. Mission: Impossible might not quite stack up next to De Palma’s true masterpieces, like Carrie and Blow Out, but it’s still a solid spy thriller full of betrayals and double-crosses.
There are no mind-blowing, death-defying stunts in the original Mission: Impossible film (and some of the effects are a little shaky), but it does have a couple of truly iconic moments, like Hunt dangling from wires to avoid the sensors on the floor of a highly secure vault.
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)
Pixar staple Brad Bird made his live-action filmmaking debut with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. This movie turned a middle-of-the-road action franchise into a must-see big-screen extravaganza. There are some huge, explosive moments in Ghost Protocol, from a chase through a sandstorm to the destruction of the Kremlin. Ghost Protocol was the first movie to take advantage of Cruise’s willingness to put his life on the line to capture an action sequence in-camera.
This movie’s flagship action sequence – in which Cruise scales the side of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest skyscraper on the planet, with a pair of sticky high-tech gloves that prove to be faulty – demands to be revisited a bunch of times. With a genuine sense of tension and Cruise’s steadfast commitment to the physicality, this set-piece is the perfect antidote to the CG-driven action scenes of most modern blockbusters.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)
The most recent Mission: Impossible movie, Fallout, is by far the best one yet. Critics instantly praised Fallout as one of the greatest action movies ever made. McQuarrie learned an important lesson from the fatal flaw in Rogue Nation. Fallout is a nonstop thrill-ride that starts out big and only gets bigger; it has a massive stunt-driven set-piece in just about every sequence except the opening.
The classical edge-of-your-seat thrills of scenes like the HALO jump and the city-wide rooftop marathon and the climactic helicopter showdown and the fast-paced police chase the wrong way around the Arc de Triomphe will never get old.