Over the past 27 years, the Mission: Impossible series has become the gold standard for big-budget action films, but that wasn’t easy to foresee when the series began. Tom Cruise had appeared in movies with action set pieces — usually involving high-powered machines, as in Top Gun and Days of Thunder — prior to making the first Mission: Impossible, but not in anything that could easily be called an action movie, and certainly not one that put him front and center in such a physically demanding role. What’s more, the TV series that inspired it, which followed the adventures of the top-secret Impossible Mission Force, was not an institution along the lines of near contemporaries like Star Trek or The Addams Family. Running for seven seasons between 1966 and 1973 (and a couple of more mostly forgotten seasons in the late 1980s), its Lalo Schifrin theme song and self-destructing messages arguably made more lasting cultural impressions than the show itself.
Yet from the start, Mission: Impossible always seemed in an action-movie class all its own. The first film produced by Cruise and Paula Wagner’s production company, 1996’s Mission: Impossible sported a first-rate cast, a screenplay by top-shelf talent including Steven Zaillian, David Koepp, and Robert Towne, and direction from A-lister Brian De Palma. True, the writing process involved draft after draft, but the results spoke for themselves. Since then, subsequent Mission: Impossible films have been of such high quality that ranking them is a more difficult task than with most series. There’s not an obvious dud — the M:I equivalent of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — in the bunch. But let’s try anyway.
7.
Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)
The second Mission: Impossible movie now looks a bit off-model. As Ethan Hunt, Cruise here seems more like a smug James Bond knockoff than the driven do-gooder of other films. It moves, by comparison, at a more leisurely pace than the original or its successors. Still, it’s not bad at all, and though director John Woo never quite creates an action sequence that can stand beside his Hong Kong classics or Face/Off until the climax (a scene that includes his trademark pigeons), the space between set pieces gives him a chance to pay homage to Hitchcock classics like Notorious and To Catch a Thief. Thandiwe Newton makes for an excellent reluctant heroine, too.
6.
Mission: Impossible III (2006)
Mission: Impossible III isn’t the best Mission: Impossible movie, but it may be the most important to the series as a whole. It arrived six years after its predecessor, time enough for summer-blockbuster audiences to move on to other series and leave Mission: Impossible behind for good if this entry didn’t deliver. Fortunately, MI:III more than delivered. Directed by J.J. Abrams, making a leap from the TV spy games of Alias to the big screen, the film features taut action set pieces but, just as importantly, humanizes Ethan via a romantic subplot with Julia (Michelle Monaghan), a fiancée who, at least as the film opens, has no idea what he does for a living. It creates a sense that he really would be happier walking away from saving the world but simply can’t. Abrams’s film also expands the series’ supporting cast by bringing in Simon Pegg as Benji, an easily flustered IMF agent, to work alongside Ving Rhames’s Luther, an expert hacker who, to this point, had been the only series’ constant apart from Ethan. Having Philip Seymour Hoffman aboard as the series’ best villain didn’t hurt either.
5.
Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation (2015)
For a while, it looked like each Mission: Impossible entry would showcase a different filmmaker. The first four entries were helmed by four different directors, none of whom made repeat appearances. That changed with the series’ fifth film, the first to be directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who’s stuck around ever since. (It’s a relationship that stretches beyond Mission: Impossible. McQuarrie also directed Cruise in Jack Reacher and has worked on the screenplays to Edge of Tomorrow, The Mummy, and Top Gun: Maverick.) What the films have lost in stylistic unpredictability they’ve gained in consistency. McQuarrie, who first collaborated with Cruise as the screenwriter for the Bryan Singer–directed Valkyrie, has been an ideal steward for the later M:I films, which have found him serving as both director and screenwriter (with some assistance in the latter job). He’s deft with characters and plotting and understands how to create a striking image, but is just as skilled at constructing action scenes around Cruise’s desire to put his body on the line to thrill audiences. (And no director knows how to film Cruise running quite as well.) Cruise participated in the series’ stunts from the start, but as action scenes elsewhere have become untethered from physics and a sense of reality (e.g. the green-screen world of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania), the M:I films have responded by heading in the opposite direction, with Cruise leading the charge. Rogue Nation opens with Ethan dangling from an airplane and ups the intensity from there via a globe-trotting plot that takes Ethan from London to Vienna to Casablanca and back again. It also introduces Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), an agent with skills to rival Ethan’s who’s been a fixture of the series ever since.
4.
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
In some respects, it’s too soon to rank Dead Reckoning Part One, for reasons suggested by its title. Unlike the self-contained Missions that preceded it, this is the first half of a two-part movie, ending on a cliffhanger that won’t be resolved until next summer. But if the story is incomplete, Part One doesn’t play like a movie saving all its best tricks for the sequel as it pits Ethan and his team against a rogue AI and the various factions hoping to control it. This, as usual, involves fights and chases in glamorous locations and featuring a variety of vehicles, climaxing with an extended battle aboard (and atop) the Orient Express that’s among the most memorable scenes in any M:I film. Between the frenzied action, McQuarrie fills it with an autumnal atmosphere that suggests Ethan (and the actor playing him) might still be at the top of his game, but nobody cheats death forever.
3.
Mission: Impossible (1996)
Two complaints were frequently lobbed at Mission: Impossible when it arrived in theaters in the summer of 1996: The plot was too convoluted to follow, and the finale didn’t live up to the rest of the film. Of the two, only the second still sticks. Byzantine but clever plots are as much a part of the M:I films (and original TV show) as masks and explosions. The climax — a battle involving a train, a helicopter, and the Channel Tunnel — isn’t bad, but it does feel more conventional than the film’s other set pieces. That’s largely because they’re so exquisitely choreographed by director Brian De Palma, one of the best-ever creators of suspense sequences and a filmmaker capable of wringing as much tension from a bead of sweat falling to the floor as from a high-speed chase (and of paying homage to the Jules Dassin heist classic Rififi in the process). It also lays down a solid foundation for future films, establishing Hunt’s gift for improvisation, willingness to break rules, and a sense that no one on the team is safe from harm (except maybe Hunt).
2.
Mission: Impossible — Fallout (2018)
The best of the McQuarrie films, Fallout picks up two years after the conclusion of Rogue Nation and, unusual for the series until this point, follows some threads left dangling by the previous film. Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), the villain of Rogue Nation, was captured at the end of the previous film, but captured isn’t the same as defeated. That requires Ethan and the team of Luther, Benjy, and Ilsa — who gel into a capable foursome as the movie progresses — to track down some stolen plutonium while attempting to unmask an extremist named John Lark. This may be the best way to sum it up: The film offers a full serving of great Mission: Impossible moments — including a dangerous visit to London’s Tate Modern museum and a brutal bathroom fight scene — then just keeps going, throwing in a you-won’t-believe-your-eyes scene in which Ethan dangles from a helicopter that tops every moment that’s come before.
1.
Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol (2011)
After Mission: Impossible III put the series back on sure footing, this fourth M:I film used that footing to vault to new heights. Sometimes literally: The film’s centerpiece finds Ethan scaling the upper floors of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, a feat accomplished in true M:I style by actually dangling the world’s biggest movie star from a terrifying height. That’s just one stop on the film’s breathless journey, one that includes Ethan and his team — expanded to include characters played by Jeremy Renner and Paula Patton — going underground after they’re falsely accused of bombing the Kremlin. Making the move from animation to live action, Brad Bird directs the film as if the medium made little difference. It’s a film of striking visuals and meticulously timed action sequences that flow into one another and create a sense that nothing is unachievable, even when it’s humans, not animated creations, performing the tasks. But then, proving the impossible possible is what these films have done from the start.