Impossible’ Movies Ranked From Worst to Best

Ranked worst and to the surprise of no one. John Woo, the visionary director of Hard Boiled and Face/Off, made an M:I movie that’s one of the shorter entries in the franchise (just a tick over two hours), yet the film feels endless to sit through. Despite a promising start with Hunt dizzyingly free solo rock climbing in Utah, and Thandiwe Newton as an alluring thief, the film quickly slips into a muddy narrative as Hunt scrambles to recover a bioweapon (the lazy go-to MacGuffin object for “something easily portable and bad”). The arms dealer villain (Dougray Scott) seems ready made for direct-to-DVD and Newton is thanklessly tasked with seducing with him. The score is a rare dud from the great Hans Zimmer, while Woo leans heavily on his signature theatrics. All the flying doves and leaping slo-mo gun battles can’t salvage this one, but at least Cruise’s long hair looks rad. (Also, Anthony Hopkins literally declares, “It’s not Mission: Difficult, Mr. Hunt. It’s Mission: Impossible!” — ugh!).

Best Stunt: Motorcycle joust (it’s absurd, but so very John Woo). 

Credit to director J.J. Abrams for injecting fresh energy into the franchise after a six-year gap and laying some of the groundwork for successes to come. In this one, Hunt is striving to have a normal life with his fiancée (Michelle Monaghan) while chasing a destructive MacGuffin (surprise, it’s a bioweapon!). While much of the supporting cast is forgettable, Abrams wisely tapped Simon Pegg as likable perma-sidekick IMF agent Benji and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as villainous arms dealer Owen Davian. Hoffman is terrific, particularly in a menacing confrontation on a plane, where Davian turns the tables on Hunt even as he’s being dangled out an open bay door. Hoffman briefly playing Cruise/Hunt in a Davian face mask is a kick as well. Another smart Abrams hire was tapping Lost composer Michael Giacchino, whose percussive urgency helped modernize the style of the M:I soundtrack (he scored the next film, too). The film lacks memorable set pieces and its tone feels oddly grim, with a rage-y Hunt and an underwhelming climax. Yet it showcased another element that became a signature franchise “special effect”: Cruise running like hell.

Best Stunt: Hunt’s manic sprint through Shanghai

Spoilers for Final Reckoning. The first half hour or so of The Final Reckoning are perhaps the weakest stretch in the whole franchise as the film struggles to not just remind audiences of what happened in Dead Reckoning, but also tries loop in elements from previous films — such as bafflingly trying to pay off the “rabbit’s foot” MacGuffin from Mission: Impossible III — leading into the softest-ever kick into Lalo Schifrin’s iconic theme. The death of Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) should have been a massively emotional moment, yet the sequence is so contrived that it’s zapped of anysuspense or resonance (He’s dying anyway? He’s living in a cage for some reason? Ethan can speak to him, but can’t reach him? He’s stuck with a bomb that has two levels of bomb-ness so he can save the city but not himself? Wait, we’re doing this two-level bomb thing twice in the same movie?).

Final Reckoning thankfully improves from there, but there’s still a heavy reliance on a sluggish gumbo of flashbacks, flash-forwards and exposition that keep disrupting the flow as the film tries to pay off not just Dead Reckoning but a franchise which previously found strength in its episodic nature. Once again, Cruise and McQuarrie also can’t decide what to do with a romantic-ish female lead, heavily implying intimacy between Grace and Ethan while keeping things vague. That said, the lengthy sequence of Ethan infiltrating a partially flooded, tumbling Russian submarine in freezing waters is totally mesmerizing (and looks wonderfully expensive) while the vintage biplane chase is exciting and impressive — though actually has so much footage of Ethan hanging and maneuvering and spinning on plane wings that you find yourself thinking, “Wow, yep, that’s Tom Cruise doing that” far more than you should.

Best stunt: The plane sequence might be the most impressive stunt, but the Sevastopol sequence is the better set piece.

Director Brian De Palma wasn’t an obvious choice to launch a Tom Cruise action franchise, yet the Untouchables helmer brought an engaging and stylish touch to the saga’s debut entry. The film (written by Robert Towne and David Koepp) wisely reworked the format of the 1960s M:I spy-drama TV series into a set-piece-stuffed thriller. The plot: Hunt is on the run to clear his name and keep a list of undercover agents out of enemy hands. Along the way, he partners with Rhames’ hacker Luther Stickell (the only character besides Hunt to appear in all of the M:I films). The film’s centerpiece is arguably the franchise’s most iconic scene: a 10-minute infiltration into a CIA headquarters computer room that’s a masterpiece of suspense, with razor-sharp editing and Cruise sweatily selling the tension in every shot (while enduring what must have surely been an agonizing core workout). It’s all very low-fi compared to the films to come, showing you don’t need big stunts to keep an M:I audience on the edge of their seats. Another standout moment is the so-very-De Palma teeter-totter camerawork in a restaurant when Cruise queasily realizes his IMF boss (the great Henry Czerny) thinks he’s a traitor. Dated visual effects weaken its bullet train climax, but the first M:I otherwise still holds up nearly three decades later.

Best Stunt: Langley heist

Here’s when the franchise really leveled up, with stronger ensembles, far more spectacular action and a wry sense of self-aware humor. That last bit is key — Cruise doesn’t get enough credit for his comedic chops, and in the later M:I films, he frequently punches up the spectacle with “I can’t believe I’m doing this, either” incredulity that serves as a proxy for the audience. While Ghost Protocol is rousingly directed by The Incredibles’ Brad Bird, writer-director Christopher McQuarrie stepped in for some crucial script rewrites and has helmed the franchise ever since.

Ghost has a really smart running gag where none of the IMF’s fancy gadgets seem to work, forcing the team to constantly improvise. Hunt’s balletic escape from a Russian prison is a standout sequence, and Jeremy Renner as IMF aide William Brandt adds some reality check contrast to daredevil Hunt. The film’s Burj Khalifa skyscraper climb in Dubai is sweaty palms fantastic, and it’s Hunt’s fear and reluctance — rather than his daring — which makes it so great (his stressed out “no shit!” while hanging by a thread off the world’s tallest building is one of Cruise’s all-time best line deliveries). This stunt also marks the beginning of the franchise’s “Wait, did Cruise do that for real?!” era. Ghost Protocol would rank higher on this list if not for the film’s weak final act (which was reworked partly for budgetary reasons), including an underwhelming climax in an automated parking garage

Best Stunt: Burj Khalifa climb

For third place, it was tough to decide between Ghost Protocol (a terrific entry that deflates about 40 minutes before it finishes) and Dead Reckoning (a wildly uneven entry with some awesome set pieces). Dead Reckoning has a mix of soaring highs and frustrating lows, with a story that essentially takes the character of Solomon Lane — a man could manipulate circumstances to maneuver Hunt into whatever outcome he desired — and evolves that idea into an AI supercomputer called The Entity, which looks like an evil screensaver (it’s programming the visuals at the rave? Is The Entity DJing too?)

Still, the big set pieces are exactly what you want from these movies. The airport scramble is a team-exercise delight, the motorcycle cliff jump is incredible and the plummeting train climax is wonderfully chaotic and masterfully shot. The return of Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) is welcome, and Luther has some nice moments in this one. The loss of Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) is well-handled but painful — one wishes there had been at least one candid moment here with Ilsa and Ethan talking about their vague relationship before she met her fate. Newcomer Hayley Atwell shines as Grace, a thief caught up in the intrigue.

Dead Reckoning starts to show the franchise’s age, as elements feel a bit like a remix of prior installments (it’s another car chase, another fight atop a speeding train, another parachute jump and another chat with the White Widow in a swanky European club), and there are meeting scenes that drag amid tedious exposition — it would be quickly fatal to drink a shot every time a character says the word “key.”

Best Stunt: Motorcycle jump (the making-of video linked here shows an incredible amount of work that went into those few moments of footage and is perhaps the only behind-the-scenes clip where the actual stunt looks far scarier than what was shown in the film).

M:I films rely on their ensemble casts and — for perhaps the first time when the films are viewed chronologically — every supporting player really pops. In addition to the ever-reliable Luther and Benji (who gets to tap some deep emotion in the film’s tense climax), Rogue Nation brings back Renner’s Brandt, has Alec Baldwin as a bullying CIA director and Sean Harris as villainous mastermind Solomon Lane. But it’s RebeccaFerguson’s British intelligence officer Ilsa Faust who truly elevates the film. Ferguson shows that she’s the female lead the franchise has been searching for, whether fighting bad guys, bantering with Hunt or emerging from swimming laps like a Crossfit Ursula Andress. This is the first time Cruise had a true co-lead in an M:I movie, and Ferguson nails every beguiling gaze. Meanwhile, McQuarrie stuns with an elegant 10-minute, Hitchcock-inspired sequence at the Vienna State Opera that’s cinematic bliss. Rouge Nation also benefits from having a cohesive-feeling story (with Hunt trying to prevent the funding of a terrorist outfit called the Syndicate), though a critical underwater breath-holding sequence looks frustratingly fake due to some CG elements — even though Cruise held his breath for up to six minutes to pull it off. The original M:I movie franchise design was that each entry would hire a different director to make every film unique, but McQuarrie was too strong to not invite back — again and again.

Best Stunt: Hunt catches a plane

Fallout is the best Mission: Impossible movie as it’s arguably the only one where every major element — the story, the M:I team, the villain, the action set pieces — is hugely effective from start to finish. The film has serious Raiders of the Lost Ark vibes the way McQuarrie masterfully strings one unique action set piece into another during a particularly breathless stretch of a two-and-a-half-hour film, which finds Hunt trying to stop nuclear-grade plutonium from falling into the Syndicate’s hands. Hunt darts from a HALO jump to a brutal bathroom brawl to a prisoner transfer breakout to a motorcycle chase — and each is riveting (chef’s kiss to that wall-of-water in a flooding truck shot).

M:I films sometimes — often — have lackluster villains, but Fallout has the franchise’s best: An unflappable, slyly witty, fist-cocking Henry Cavill, who constantly keeps Hunt on his heels (it’s can’t be easy to scene-steal around Cruise, but Cavill manages; and props to Cruise for being down for it). Fallout also has the franchise’s best score (by Lorne Balfe, who was brought back for Dead Reckoning) and the the most gripping third act — a sensational helicopter chase and clifftop fight against a ticking clock. It has been the highest-grossing entry so far ($791 million worldwide), though Final Reckoning might top that. Ethan Hunt may not be as iconic of an action brand name as James Bond, but Fallout is the best James Bond movie since Casino Royale, if not better.

Best Stunt: (Tie) Halo jump, bathroom brawl, chopper chase.