Memories of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE

90’s film adaptations of 60’s/70’s TV shows were as numerous as their audience was non-existent.

DRAGNET.  THE FLINTSTONES.  WILD WILD WEST.  THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES.  LOST IN SPACE.  LEAVE IT TO BEAVER.  THE AVENGERS.  SGT. BILKO.  The list goes on and on, and I bet you’d totally forgot about most of them.  Yeah, yeah, there were a few that seemed to achieve some sort of cultural legitimacy: THE FUGITIVE remains one of the great action films of all time, and THE BRADY BUNCH MOVIE was a unique experience, slavishly recreating the source material while taking a MAD Magazine-style hatchet to everything it stood for.  But, for the most part, this stretch of Hollywood history served mostly as a reminder that desperate IP-chasing is not a modern disease.

Smack-dab in the middle of the decade, though, came one such classic TV adaptation that managed not only to be a critical and commercial hit, but endure for nearly three whole decades, all while basically eschewing the characters and ethos of the original, casting an established star as a brand new character.  It shouldn’t have worked, but somehow, 1996’s MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE did.

It’s kind of insane that we’re still talking about the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE film franchise in 2025.  It seemed kind of dead as recently as 2006, then seemed unstoppable again by 2018, and now, it’s coasting to a final ending, at least for the moment.  In those thirty years, we’ve gotten to see a film series that started its life as an anthology vehicle for whatever director that was currently hottest (in terms of career trajectory, anyway), before transforming into the Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie Action Stunt Spectaculariam!  A lot has happened in thirty years.

I’m not sure there’s ever been a set of films quite like it: a classic TV adaptation that has effectively severed ties from the source material without ever feeling like it was flying without a net, as well as a series where everyone’s specific rankings of the films within are vastly different (I’ve seen just about every single one ranked as somebody’s favorite).  A franchise that feels like a series of stand-alones until, suddenly, they weren’t.  Also, it’s the rare legacy series whose content is restricted to just the movies.  No spin-offs, no prequel TV series, no “online exclusives”, nothing.  Again, at least for the moment.  MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE basically stands alone.

So…now that its finale, THE FINAL RECKONING, has been out for a week, I thought it might be fun to take a look back at the series as a whole and see how we got here.  Our first mission, should we choose to accept it: let’s party like it’s 1996!

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996)

Directed by: Brian DePalma

Written by: David Koepp, Robert Towne

Starring: Tom Cruise, Jon Voight, Emmanuelle Beart, Henry Czerny, Jean Reno, Ving Rhames, Vanessa Redgrave

Released: May 22, 1996

Length: 110 minutes

True to form, the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE film series opens with a double cross.

I had vaguely remembered that the opening mission goes sideways, the consequence of which is the entire IMF team getting almost completely wiped out, setting up Ethan Hunt’s subsequent framing as a potential mole.  But what I hadn’t recalled was that the initial IMF team was completely star-studded.  Kristin Scott Thomas!  Jon Voight!  A suspiciously uncredited Emilio Estevez!  All of them established and axed within the first thirty minutes (well, except for Voight, more on that in a second).

This initial twist carried a substantial amount of weight, especially considering Voight was playing Jim Phelps, the acclaimed role popularly played by Peter Graves on the television series, and possibly the most iconic Mission: Impossible character by the time the first movie was released.  So, here he was, Phelps, the only character link between the TV show and the movies, and he’s gunned down at the end of Act 1.  In 1996, before each subsequent entry in the series became a constant attempt to one-up the movie prior, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE only had to live in the shadow of the television series.  And its solution became clear: kill the TV show and set its body on fire.

That match was finally thrown onto the corpse when Phelps, who seemingly survived his assassination attempt, is revealed to be the mole within IMF, the ultimate heel turn.  I have no real insight into how audiences felt about this at the time, but rest assured that Graves wasn’t happy.  He was apparently initially offered the chance to reprise the role for the film, only to turn it down once learning the full context of his involvement.  Other actors from the M:I series were also vocally pissed, including Martin Landau and Greg Morris, the latter of whom alleged to have stormed out of the theater before it was over.

The reaction is understandable; no actor wants to feel like their prior successes were being pissed on in order to make way for some young hot-shots to take your place.  I’m not even totally convinced the Phelps traitor twist was fully necessary; the movie would have worked just fine if Voight had been playing just some other guy, with the added bonus of not throwing your source material the bird.  On the other hand, sometimes things need to die for something new to be born.

In this case, what grows from the ashes of the IMF’s decimation is the first and, until the arrival of TOP GUN: MAVERICK, the only Tom Cruise movie franchise.  When looked at through that prism, it can be a little surprising.  After all, Cruise’s biggest movies as of late have been sequels (welcome to end-stage Hollywood).  But, up to this point, he had managed to maintain a relatively balanced career, mixing populist hits (RISKY BUSINESS, COCKTAIL, TOP GUN) with prestige dramas (BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, A FEW GOOD MEN, RAIN MAN).  By 1996, he had already been directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Scotts Ridley and Tony, Franco Zeferelli, Martin Scorsese, and Oliver Stone.  For being a pretty-boy A-lister, he had already racked up the type of career most performers would literally commit murder to have.  Plus, they were all self-contained films.

But MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE would represent the beginning of the definitive “Tom Cruise franchise”, even more than TOP GUN (at least for now).  It’s easy to see why they kept coming back to him for this well; Cruise does remarkably well as this iteration of Ethan Hunt.  He’s drenched in panic, his back constantly against the wall and in over his head, yet you can always feel him thinking.  You don’t know how he’s going to pull this all off, but you know he’s going to be able to.  From the jump, then, we have the core tenet of the franchise’s original creation in play: Ethan the elite improviser.

Beyond that, though, it’s remarkable how much of what the series would eventually become is already present.  We have Cruise running from his bosses in order to clear his name, we have him building a team with Ving Rhames and (insert European guy).  Ethan Hunt is gallivanting around the world with a stunning brunette at his side.  At the movie’s core are a set of amazing action sequences that make you ask, “how’d they do that?”  Everyone remembers Cruise hanging from the ceiling of a safe, trying desperately not to touch the hair-trigger-sensitive floor, a sequence that became legendary immediately.  But I had forgotten that the final train chase escalates with Jean Reno piloting a helicopter into a tunnel!  Big time stuff.

Oh, yeah, and then there’s that De Palma guy.  Recruited directly by Cruise to direct this initial installment, Brian De Palam gives M:I 1 a sexual charge and weirdo energy that, frankly, the McQuarrie installments could stand to infuse themselves with every once in a while.  There’s a scene that occurs shortly after Hunt escapes from the trap set by Director Kittridge*, where Phelps’ young wife Claire re-emerges.  No longer knowing who to trust, Hunt performs a body search on her to ensure she’s not bugged.  Ethan and Claire so quickly come so close to fucking here that it’s a little rattling.  It’s not subtle, and it’s not trying to be.  It’s great.

* Played by Henry Czerny, who will return to this series a mere 27 years later!

With De Palma in the director’s chair, the first MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movie is a relatively tight, paranoid-drenched thriller, easily the shortest in the series, and a far cry from the exquisite stunt show spectaculars the series would later become (note: this is not a bad thing!).  It’s hard not to wonder what could have been had they decided to lock this in as the formula early on.  But, then, the series would have lost its most charming attribute: its ability to constantly reinvent itself.

Starting with its very first follow-up….

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2 (2000)

Directed by: John Woo

Written by: Robert Towne

Starring: Tom Cruise, Thandiwe Newton, Dougray Scott, Ving Rhames, Richard Roxburgh, Brendan Gleeson, John Polson

Released: May 24, 2000

Length: 124 minutes

“I miss when this series was an anthology.”

This was something my friend said to me a couple of years ago when I asked him if he had seen DEAD RECKONING yet.  He hadn’t been able to at the time we spoke, and it caused him to wistfully reflect on the old tradition the franchise had established of having a different director at the helm every time, each one so completely different in their creative abilities and philosophies on what makes a great film.  It wasn’t the hottest film take I had ever heard, but it was far from the consensus opinion on the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movies, at least by that time.

I thought about this a lot when watching MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2, a movie I both like and don’t like in equal doses.  Taken as part of a massive entity, it falls a little short from what I’m looking for in an Ethan Hunt adventure.  Rather than using cleverness and teamwork, this iteration of Hunt likes to ram his motorcycle into other guys’ motorcycles.  He doesn’t like to talk much, and has more fun rock-climbing and wooing chicks than he does anything else.  Most crucially, he seems to be working concurrently with IMF management, instead of directly against.  It doesn’t quite scratch the itch you get when wanting to watch a MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movie.

On the other hand, if you separate it from its predecessor and future installments, and just look at it as a Tom Cruise-led John Woo action flick from 2000, it kinda rocks.  It’s got everything you need for a good time.  Huge, (literally) fiery action sequences?  Oh yeah.  A simmering contempt for the nature of women?  You’ve got it!  Hallways full of doves?  Did you even need to ask?  And, oh man, if I thought De Palma’s M:I flick was horny, Woo took that thought and bought it dinner first.  It’s not even so much that Nyah and Ethan want to fuck the entire time (although they do); it’s that everything feels sexually charged in some capacity.  

Hell, take that scene with Sean Ambrose (our villain du jour, played by Dougray Scott) and his second-in-command Hugh (Richard Roxburgh), after Nyah has successfully reintegrated herself into former beau Sean’s life.  The scene is ostensibly about Hugh’s distrust of Nyah’s sudden reappearance.  But what stands out about it is their constant refrain of someone “gagging on” something.  Hugh implies Nyah was dying to “gag on it”* when they split up.  Sean insists he’ll be “gagging on her” when this is all said and done.  To emphasize it all, Sean sticks Hugh’s finger into a cigar cutter and cuts off the tip.  En fuego!

*As I alluded to earlier, the whole movie has this kind of weirdly harsh, vaguely misogynist dialogue peppered throughout.  Just as one example: an uncredited Anthony Hopkins dips in long enough to assure Ethan that Nyah is qualified to go undercover and seduce the villainous Sean: “To go to bed with a man, then lie to him?  She’s a woman - she’s got all the training she needs.”  

In this context, the pre-9/11-ness of it all is actually a boon, not a hindrance.  Because, holy cow, is MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2 the most 2000 movie ever.  We’ve got Ethan in a leather jacket, we’ve got an original song by Metallica on the soundtrack, we’ve got a nu metal cover of the famous Lalo Schifrin theme by none other than Limp Bizkit, the whole thing is seemingly saturated in oranges and reds….no movie has quite captured the look and feel of George W. Bush’s impending rise to leadership than this.

Yes, a lot of the common complaints about it are accurate.  It’s not so much that the plot is confusing; it’s one of those movie whose story makes sense from moment to moment (just cross your fingers that nobody asks you to explain it afterwards), but Robert Towne’s tale about the Chimera virus is undeniably busy, with constant use of the “mask reveal” to pull the rug out from under you.  Thandiwe Newton is probably the least compelling of all the lead women in the series, and the same goes for Dougray Scott’s turn as the villain* (although neither are outright bad).  Outside of that truly stunning opening rock climbing sequence, and the bananas closing fight, a lot of the stunts have an unfortunate unreal stylization to them.  I highly doubt any of them were faked; Cruise dislocated his shoulder for this movie, so I don’t think he would cut corners later.   But they don’t often make you gasp, make you wonder “how did they possibly do that?”

*Fun fact about Dougray Scott: he would have been Wolverine in the 2000 X-MEN movie, had it not been for MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2 running long, giving Tom Cruise time to push him to not do it.  Enter Hugh Jackman, and the rest is history.

My biggest issue, though, is that Ethan is just too much of a cool guy in this one.  He’s constantly in control, wearing shades and a leather jacket like he’s about to sell you Pepsi in a 1998 Super Bowl commercial.  The characterization that has made the later entries such hits is…not the opposite, exactly.  But some of the most thrilling moments of the franchise center around Ethan Hunt trying to figure out what to do next in real time.  Something’s not working; now what?  M:I 2 Ethan never has that issue, so you’re just kind of stuck with “badass lead guy”.  Cruise is good at that, but you know the whole enterprise is capable of more than that.

John Woo, then, ended up being kind of an awkward fit, although I can always respect a studio allowing for a non-intuitive sequel by just letting one unique voice take the baton from another and go to town.  It’s undeniably a John Woo movie, and a pretty fun one at that.  But it’s a weird MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movie, maybe the one furthest away from what people think of when they think of this series.

Of course, then the next guy would come in and start laying the groundwork for those later entries….

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III (2006)

Directed by: J.J. Abrams

Written by: Alex Krutzman, Roberto Orci, Abrams

Starring: Tom Cruise, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Ving Rhames, Billy Crudup, Michelle Monaghan, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Keri Russell, Maggie Q, Laurence Fishburne

Released: May 5, 2006

Length: 126 minutes

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III starts with a cold open that became legendary almost instantaneously upon release.  We begin in media res with Ethan Hunt (Cruise) awaking from fog, finding himself shackled to a chair, staring into the face of a man we will come to know as Owen Davian (Hoffman).  Davian asks him simply, “Where is the Rabbit’s Foot?”  Hunt attempts to defer, until he realizes Davian is holding a gun to the head of Julia (Monaghan), his wife and now a bound-and-gagged hostage.

Davian begins to count to ten.  One.  Two.  Hunt keeps exclaiming that the Rabbit’s Foot is in Paris.  Three.  Davian says he’s lying.  Four.  Hunt tries to negotiate, offering to help.  Five.  Davian scoffs, rejecting his kind of help.  Six.  Hunt begins to calmly tell Julia that everything's going to be okay.  Seven.  As Davian inches closer to ten (eight), he eventually goes into an all-out panic.  He insists he brought him the Rabbit’s Foot.

Nine.  Hunt is finally backed into a wall, the likes of which we haven’t seen.  His feint to hide the Rabbit’s Foot from the bad guy has failed.

Ten.

Bang.

It might be the single most famous non-stunt scene in the entire MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE franchise, a cold open for the ages.  In three minutes, the series has been re-invented, from Ethan Hunt the leather jacket-wearing cool guy, to Ethan Hunt the family man about to lose everything.  It’s classic J.J. Abrams.

Here’s the thing about the scene, though.  In context?  The sequence is a complete lie, a frustrating misdirection tantamount to one of those old Superman comic book covers, depicting the caped crusader in some impossible, nearly absurd situation, only for you to reach that page and discover it was a villain-induced nightmare or something.  It turned out to be a trick, something to suck you in and absolutely nothing more.

That’s classic J.J. Abrams, too.

For the record, it turns out that the woman who gets shot in the head is not Julia, but in fact another woman wearing a Julia mask.  Yes, Davian’s translator has been sacrificed to test the authenticity of the Rabbit’s Foot; Hunt never confessed it was fake, thus, Davian can trust he brought him the real deal.  It doesn’t make a ton of sense, but in Abrams-world, things don’t need to make sense if it services a delightful moment.  You liked the opening scene, right?  So what does it matter?

You may also be wondering, “Why does he keep saying ‘Rabbit’s Foot’?  What is the Rabbit’s Foot?”  Your guess is as good as mine.  Seriously, the movie never says, a textbook mystery-box move from the master of the artform.  Yes, one could argue MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE is a series filled with nonsense objects that exist only for our protagonists to have something to pursue, but at the very least, the other movies make the attempt to give a cursory explanation of what, say, The Entity is or who The Syndicate are.  They never make sense, but they’re there.  Only M:I III dares to ask, “who cares?  Are you having a good time?  Then what does it matter?”

If it seems like I’m excoriating this movie, it should be known that I do overall enjoy it.  There are upsides to having J.J. Abrams at the helm.  It’s exquisitely cast, with at least two actors making their debut here that will continue on in the series (Monaghan and Simon Pegg).  We also have a villain performance for the ages from Hoffman, who makes Owen Davian all the creepier by making him kind of…business-like, as if he regularly gets into scrapes like this.  And, of course, it wouldn’t be a J.J. Abrams Joint if Keri Russell and Greg Grunberg didn’t make appearances.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III is fun and zippy in a way the first two aren’t quite; for all of his narrative corner cuts, Abrams does have a sense of how to keep an audience engaged from moment to moment.  Also, as mentioned, I think re-conceptualizing Hunt as a young husband with eyes on retiring from the game is an intriguing one; it’s no accident that the series continued to surround Hunt with people he cares about (which provides the stakes of something possibly happening to them along the way).  Yes, perhaps this is Abrams ripping himself off; a secret agent trying to maintain and balance a professional and private life is essentially the premise of Alias.  But Alias was a fun show, at least for a while!  Speaking of early-2000’s shows: the muted look of the movie, along with its more torture-y elements, evokes the prime run of 24.  But 24 was also a fun rollercoaster!  These aren’t completely bizarre items to evoke in your mid-2000’s spy actioner.

What is bizarre is the movie’s complete and utter inept action.  Say what you will about MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II, but the admittedly ridiculous and cartoonish action is always clear.  You’re never confused as to what is supposed to be happening, even if what is happening does not resemble anything in our mortal plane.  M:I III, on the other hand, goes for confusion and obfuscation, with many of the fights happening in shadowy darkness.  It’s disappointing, and frankly inexcusable to have poor action in an action flick.  

Anyway, it gets a passing grade for me, although barely, if only because it does at least resemble what the series would find itself becoming.  Bad Robot would remain a primary producer of the franchise from here on out.  But, looking back, maybe it shouldn’t have been the STAR WARS sequel trilogy that finally codified Abrams’ particular floor and ceilings.  It was all there for us in 2006.

Wait, fuck, I just remembered that “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall” line.  Maybe I do hate this movie.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - GHOST PROTOCOL (2011)

Directed by: Brad Bird

Written by: Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec

Starring: Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton, Michael Nyvquist, Lea Seydoux

Released: December 16, 2011

Length: 133 minutes

I remembered being very surprised when I heard this movie was coming out.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III was, technically speaking, a critical and financial hit; it was the eight-highest grossing worldwide film of 2006, and holds a 71% on Rotten Tomatoes.  But it also was the last entry in the series for over half a decade, an infinite eternity in modern Hollywood time.  There didn’t appear to be any particular reason for this, besides Cruise and Abrams being very busy men.  But that five year gap was the difference between my still being in high school and me being a year into the first substantial job I ever held.  It felt like a lot of time had passed, is my point.

So, yes, imagine my surprise when they dug up that movie series from my youth.  Imagine my bigger surprise when it ended up being really good, arguably the best one of the whole franchise.  Part of it has to do with the guy in the director’s chair, Brad Bird.  He’s had a fascinating career, and he’s been around for a lot longer than it sometimes feels.  He got his start bouncing from 70’s Disney to the early days of The Simpsons, then back to movies with THE IRON GIANT, then back to Disney with THE INCREDIBLES and RATATOUILLE, two of the most beloved animated movies of the 21st century.  All of this led to GHOST PROTOCOL, his live-action feature film debut.  

And you know what?  He knocked it out of the park.  J.J. Abrams may have established the appropriate characterization for Ethan Hunt, as well as made a couple of key casting choices.  But it’s Bird* that would firmly and forever establish what a MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movie could do.  From here, they become not so much action flicks, but rather a series of stunt setpieces.  

*Oh, and, I suppose, the rewriting work of a guy named Christopher McQuarrie.  More on him later.

More than that, Bird injects some needed texture and personality into the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE series.  It becomes much more of a team game from here on out; this time around, Hunt is paired with Benji (Pegg), the M:I III techie turned freshly-trained field agent, Jane (Patton), an agent who swears revenge after the murder of her IMF boyfriend at the start of the film, and William Brandt (Renner), an intelligence analyst who suddenly finds himself in the field, dodging bullets and getting into scraps that are way over his head.  Pairing these three with a “improvise/think on your feet” hero like Ethan Hunt presents a lot of avenues for tension and conflict.  And that may be GHOST PROTOCOL’s great contribution to turning the films into what they are: shit goes wrong a lot during these impossible missions.  

An early scene in the Kremlin pairs Ethan with a nervous Benji.  Both have successfully gone undercover as high-level Russian generals, and have set up a complicated piece of machinery in a guarded hallway.  Essentially, there’s a projection camera behind a scrim.  As long as the projection is uninterrupted, it reflects the end of the hallway being covered up (i.e. you can hide behind it without anyone in front being any the wiser).  Naturally, it’s only a matter of time before Benji absent-mindedly interrupts the feed, projecting his head on the giant scrim.  He’s pulled away just in time, making for a moment both thrillingly cartoonish and genuinely tense.  

The big set piece in GHOST PROTOCOL is maybe the most famous one of the whole franchise, and it’s all because of it being rooted in that “fuck, now what?” ethos.  It’s the sequence in Dubai where Ethan (and, by extension, Tom Cruise himself) finds himself hanging by a metaphorical thread on the side of the Burj Khalifa, quite literally the tallest structure in the world.  Just the image alone of him simply dangling there would be entertaining enough; however, it’s all sandwiched with the IMF team having to continuously improvise.  Hunt is out there in the first place to enter a room in the skyscraper that has no other interior access point.  He’s aided by a pair of “sticky gloves”, the function of which is rather elegantly explained in rhyme (If the lights in the gloves are blue, you’re glue.  Red?  Dead).  It becomes a countdown as to when one of the damn gloves will turn red, and when it does, it’s a real ass-clenching moment.  

It’s all in the service of trying to facilitate two simultaneous meetings between our main bad guy (an adequately nasty Nyqvist) and a secondary villain/assassin (Seydoux) who is selling him nuclear codes.  As Jane pretends to be the seller on one floor, and Hunt has to pretend to be the buyer on another floor in a separate meeting (hoping neither party has ever met), they end up having to figure out a way to remotely “pass” each other the real codes.

Oh, on top of everything else?  A sandstorm is coming outside.  They set it up just early enough that you completely forget about it until it hits, putting everything into even further chaos.  Shit just keeps going wrong.  That’s the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE way.

The whole movie is structured like this.  A major sequence near the end depends on Brandt jumping down a hole, and having to just take it on faith that Benji will “catch” him with a high-level magnet.  When it comes time in the planned-down-to-the-second caper for Brandt to jump, he does what any of us would do in his position: he hesitates, then hesitates again, then has to start psyching himself up to do it.  It’s vaguely un-heroic.  It’s great.  

There’s lots of little things to like about GHOST PROTOCOL throughout.  I’ve always had a soft spot for the movie’s coda in Seattle, mainly because it keeps Ving Rhames’ streak of being in every one of these going.  But there is something weirdly sweet about the reveal that Ethan has been keeping tabs on his now-estranged wife Jules (Michelle Monaghan returns in a cameo!), even if he is essentially stalking her from a distance.  Maybe it’s because it feels like something Tom Cruise would do in real life.

Last thing: GHOST PROTOCOL makes me wonder what happened to the Josh Holloway leading man career we seemed destined to have post-LOST.  He appears only briefly in the beginning as Agent Trevor Hannaway, who is crucially assassinated in the opening act.  Maybe it’s my Sawyer bias coming out, but I think he pops in his, like, two minutes of screentime.  He should have been in these movies in an actual capacity!  Where in the multiverse do I have to go to see Josh Holloway in more than one scene of a MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movie??

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION (2015)

Directed by: Christopher McQuarrie

Written by: Christopher McQuarrie, Drew Pearce

Starring: Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Ving Rhames, Sean Harris, Alec Baldwin

Released: July 31, 2015

Length: 131 minutes

Every McQuarrie-directed MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movie revolves its entire marketing campaign behind one specific stunt scene.  The sixth movie, FALLOUT, seemingly put its chips behind that bathroom fight scene.  Part 7, DEAD RECKONING, ended its trailer with that harrowing motorcycle cliff dive.  McQuarrie’s initial outing, ROGUE NATION, made a whole-ass behind-the-scenes short (that ran in theatres!) about the crafting of its major stunt, Ethan Hunt (and, by association, Tom Cruise himself) hanging off the side of an ascending cargo plane.  

Although the marketing was sometimes a little try-hard, it’s likely the main reason we’ve all collectively decided that Tom Cruise is now “insane (non-derogatory)”.  The scene is undeniably cool, an ass-clencher along the same lines as GHOST PROTOCOL’s Burj Khalifa climb.  Extra credit where it’s due, though: ROGUE NATION opens with this stunt.  It turns out to be an in media res mission that kicks off the next two-plus hours.  The movie fires its biggest, shiniest bullet right away, as called a shot as there’s been in the last decade.

This isn’t to say that the rest of the fifth MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE has nothing to offer; on the contrary, it’s probably my favorite one.  Why?  I’ll give you five good reasons:

• A genuinely scary villain.  Major antagonists have never been the series’ strong suit (the real Big Bad of the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE series is Cruise’s fear of mortality), but Sean Harris makes a big impression from the jump as a legitimately unnerving villain, as he coldly assassinates a helpless IMF operative in front of Hunt.  He’s got it all: a cool name (Solomon Lane!), a cool evil-sounding group (The Syndicate!), and, most importantly, a cool voice (Lane sounds like he could have voiced a cartoon cobra in another life).  He’s got it all!  It’s no wonder he would become the series’ first recurring baddie. 

• The opera.  The scene at the Vienna Opera, where Hunt and crew must foil an assassination attempt against the Chancellor of Austria, is always the moment where I go, “Oh yeah, ROGUE NATION is my favorite.”  Part of it is its gorgeous usage of Puccini’s Nessun Dorma, which, yes, might be the most popular aria ever written, but dammit, it’s also the most beautiful piece of music ever written, so I get it!  But a bigger part of it for me is its focus on quiet stealth, something that will start getting lost as the series goes on, and the stunt setpieces grow larger and larger.  It all takes place backstage, on the catwalks, against the scrims, as Hunt desperately fights Ilsa to keep her from performing her hit (or is she here to stop the real assassin?).  In what feels like a Hitchcockian homage, the bullet is timed to a certain endnote being sung, which causes a panic when you realize the aria is wrapping up.  It’s genuinely engrossing stuff.  It makes me want to dress up and see an opera.

• The underwater sequence. The long sequence where Hunt has to hold his breath and swim underwater to switch out a computer chip (don’t worry about it) doesn’t get the same shine as other scenes in the series, possibly because it’s obviously goosed with CGI (even Paramount presumably wouldn’t be able to insure against the biggest movie star in the world drowning on a film set).  But…it terrifies me every time, even though I know he lives (spoilers, I guess).  Drowning is a specific trigger for me; put a character’s head under water and I immediately get anxious.  This scene has the nerve to bake in an “oxygen remaining” ticking clock…it’s just so gloriously a lot for me.  I wish people talked about this scene more.

• The addition of Rebecca Ferguson.  Adding Ilsa Faust to the proceedings feels not unlike a perennial playoff NBA team making a trade for that one secondary star and all of a sudden becoming a championship contender.  It came as the price of Paula Patton, who is maybe the single most underrated M:I performer.  But the price was worth it.  Rebecca Ferguson fits right in, a presence we didn’t know we needed.  It had been a while since Hunt was given a genuine love interest, and this time, we have one whose loyalties are not precisely clear, even all the way to the end.  Ilsa’s strong, yet vulnerable.  She’s a friend and a foe.  She’s perfect.

• Luther’s back! Adding to the NBA team metaphor, when it comes to roster building, just as crucial as acquiring talent in the first place is slotting that talent into roles where they can best succeed.  And…look, I know people run hot and cold on Jeremy Renner, especially at the time, when he became the guy studios were turning to when they were considering handing franchises over to a new, young guy (see also: THE BOURNE series), but I liked him a lot as part of the team in GHOST PROTOCOL.  I especially liked that they used his newcomer status to question some of the tropes of the series (asking Hunt point-blank after an improvised plan pans out, “how did you know that was going to work?”).  But one of the best moves ROGUE NATION pulls is putting Brandt behind the scenes and re-installing the only other OG of the series besides Cruise: Ving Rhames is back full-time!  I know it’s silly, but Luther getting called back into action adds some vague “legitimacy” to the proceedings.  He’s the closest thing Ethan has to a genuine friend!  It also puts Brandt in a better spot than the field: navigating the politics between the IMF and the CIA.  As a result, he gets one of the best closing lines of the series, at least in context: “I can neither confirm nor deny details of any such operation without the Secretary’s approval.”

Fuck it, I’m off to watch ROGUE NATION again.  Catch you guys in a little bit.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT (2018)

Directed by: Christopher McQuarrie

Written by: Christopher McQuarrie

Starring: Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Angela Bassett, Ving Rhames, Sean Harris, Alec Baldwin, Michelle Monaghan, Vanessa Kirby

Released: July 27, 2018

Length: 147 minutes

So, I’m going to get it out of the way upfront.  Technically speaking, I think MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT is overrated.

That’s only technically speaking, though.  In my defense, it’s often described as one of the greatest action movies ever made, full stop, both now and at the time.  Given that astronomical level of hype, it can’t help but fall short of that benchmark.  Also, as mentioned, ROGUE NATION is my favorite MISSION.  Sorry, FALLOUT girlies.

Okay, that out of the way, the sixth MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movie still shreds all kinds of ass.  First of all, just look at that cast.  To extend the NBA metaphor from the last entry even further, snatching up Henry Cavill and Vanessa Kirby was like the Golden State Warriors signing Kevin Durant a year after winning 73 games.  It felt almost unfair.

Also, the sheer volume of instant-classic action scenes contained within FALLOUT cannot be overstated.  One of my favorite things about it is not just the fact that it contains both the famous “HALO jump” scene, where Cruise free falls out of a aircraft carrier (which, yes, he did for real, thank you for asking*), and the brutal bathroom fight where Cavill “reloads” his fists, a sequence that is filled with the perfect kind of escalating conflict and turns of fortune that define the best action scenes (oh, fuck, Walker destroyed the mask-making laptop after using it to smack a guy in the face!).  It’s the fact that these two scenes happen essentially back to back.

*On top of that, it also meant a camera operator had to do the jump as well.  What a gig!  Hey, Craig O’Brien, do you want to do the same reckless stunt that Tom Cruise does, with 100% of the danger, but with exactly 0% of the recognition?

FALLOUT can often be exhilarating to the point of exhaustion, which creates this little lull in the middle of what was (at that point) the longest MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movie, which may be why it’s not precisely in my “Number One” slot.  I’m almost burnt out around the 75-minute mark, as the (reportedly made up as it went along) plot begins to unspool, and a major rat is revealed.  Of course, FALLOUT picks back up in maybe its greatest finale, with so many tense situations (Luther and Julia defusing a bomb, Ilsa gagged and tied to a chair, Benji being hung from a noose, Ethan and Walker chasing each other in dueling helicopters, Ethan hanging from a rock wall) overlapping onto each other that the sequence should almost certainly have imploded into itself.  In the hands of almost anybody else, save the elite of the elite directors, it would have.  That it holds together at all, let alone this perfectly, is maybe the series’ greatest achievement.  

FALLOUT represents many firsts in the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE franchise.  We have our first returning director (McQuarrie), as well as our first returning villain (Sean Harris returns!) and, amazingly, our first returning female character in Ilsa Faust (well, unless you also count the aforementioned Julia, who we’ll talk about in a minute).  All of this connective tissue is perhaps the largest shift in the franchise’ philosophy, and our biggest sign that the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE series had entered “modern Hollywood”.  From here on out, the franchise trades in anthology for mythology.  Now, figures from the past could return to haunt Ethan in the present.  Whether this is good or bad, I suppose, depends on how you like your MISSIONs.  I think the idea that everything had to eventually “fit together” and “make sense” would get the series in trouble as it barrelled towards its final entry.  On the other hand, it allowed for FALLOUT to include emotionally cathartic subplots like the return of Ethan’s ex-wife.  

You can’t help but feel like bringing Michelle Monaghan back to the series gave the proceedings a sense of legitimacy, an opportunity to turn Ethan into an actual character, as opposed to a high-level avatar for Cruise’s id.  Being able to fully check in on her life since the events of III, seeing that she’s been able to move on, and separate herself from the ongoing downward spiral that is Ethan Hunt…it’s weirdly nice, a sign that maybe not everybody Ethan’s ever known is doomed to be just like him, living off the grid, away from regular society, in hiding or on the run.  She can just be a doctor, helping people.  It’s a nice thing, and a lovely note for Julia to go out on.

There are lots of silly, excessive things in FALLOUT, an insane Wolf Blitzer cameo chief among them.  But those are the kinds of things you’re allowed to do when you’re making action at such a high level.  It’s hard to overstate what a big deal this movie seemed to be at the time; it has the franchise’s highest opening weekend, and is its overall box office champ.  It’s also worth mentioning it’s the Rotten Tomatoes champ of all eight movies, landing at an extremely impressive 98%.  It’s a nearly impossible mission to be throwing your fastest pitches two decades in, but it’s one MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE chose to accept.

Oh, and it has easily the best trailer of any movie from the past ten years.   It’s the good shit. You don’t even care that it features an Imagine Dragons song.  Well, you almost don’t care.  No trailer is quite that good.  But FALLOUT’s is close.

So, once you’ve hit your critical and popular peak six entries (and 22 years) in, where does one go from there?  Well, you’re sort of forced to figure out how to land the plane…

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING (2023)

Directed by: Christopher McQuarrie

Written by: Christopher McQuarrie, Erik Jendresen

Starring: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Henry Czerny, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Shea Whigham

Released: July 12, 2023

Length: 163 minutes

With the seventh installment of the series, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE begins its long descent towards something resembling a conclusion, although it should be mentioned that the connective tissue between this and the eight installment is not as thick as you might imagine.  There’s quite a few plot threads set up here that are seemingly abandoned.  An early allusion to the murder of a woman that both Ethan and Gabriel (this movie’s villain) knew sure seems important; it won’t turn out to be much, despite many claims from McQuarrie to the contrary back in 2023.

It should be said here that, as alluded to earlier, the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movies are not precisely written with Swiss watch precision, at least as far as plotting and story-telling goes.  Famously, the McQuarrie movies have started with fleshing out the ideas for stunts, then working backward to connect them all.  There’s a certain logic to this: at this point, you’re here for the jaw-dropping, death-defying filmmaking, not necessarily the “story”.  All you really ask is that the movie makes linear sense.  This can get them in trouble every once in a while, though, especially when (as we’ll see a lot of in FINAL RECKONING) they start trying to connect all the various dots that the more-anthology feel of the early series left behind.

I bring this all up because when I watch DEAD RECKONING, I always worry that the opening thirty minutes or so is going to wind up tanking the following two hours.  It’s really talky, like, in a “four or five people are sitting in a room just explaining what the main threat is and who the bad guy is” kind of way.  Yes, there’s a desert shootout in the middle, but it’s also fairly inert in its pace, in a way these movies almost never are.  It feels like the movie is impatiently holding back and getting the boring vegetables out of the way before it can start serving several rounds of dessert.

As soon as the opening credits finally roll, though, and DEAD RECKONING gets to where it wants to go, it’s an almost nonstop delight, on par with the last two installments.  It’s one of the better infusions of talent they’ve had in a long time.  Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff and Shea Whigham all appear for the first time in this one, and they each feel, in their own ways, like they’ve been there the whole time.  Atwell in particular feels like she’s finally having the moment she seemed destined to have after becoming a major highlight in the early days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as the beloved Captain America beau Peggy Carter.  I also give props for giving Whigham one of the better movie-length bits, never quite knowing if anybody’s wearing a mask or not.

There are some stumbles: I understand that Rebecca Ferguson wanted to leave, so there may have been nothing to do to avoid killing her off, but, Jesus Christ, what a loss for the franchise.  I’m not convinced that Esai Morales is exactly who anybody had in mind as the “final boss” of the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE series, especially after coming off of two straight hits of Sean Harris.  It’s also pushing three hours, which is just a tad too excessive for these things (undoubtedly inflated by that damn opening thirty minutes).

Then again, the stunts are all top-notch.  The biggest compliment I can give DEAD RECKONING is this: their entire marketing campaign was built around the climactic motorcycle cliff jump, the one that truly looks like Cruise is going to kill himself for sure this time.  There was no way to go into this office without having some sort of sense that that stunt was coming eventually.  And, yet, we got to that scene in the theatres and, as he launched himself off that goddamn cliff, the entire crowd gasped and held their breath.  We had all basically seen it already, and we freaked out anyway.  That’s almost impossible, yet they did it.  Maybe the McQuarrie writing method works after all.

It should be mentioned that DEAD RECKONING was a bit of a box-office flop, grossing $172 million domestically against a $291 million budget.  Now, its gross increases to just under $600 million when worldwide is taken into consideration, and DEAD RECKONING was the tenth-highest grossing film of 2023, but the numbers are the numbers; it fell a couple hundred million short of FALLOUT’s final tally.  Now, I’m not a believer in the line constantly having to go up, any context be damned (much of its box office woes undoubtedly stemmed from the once-in-a-generation BARBENHEIMER phenomenon entering theatres one week later, instantly sucking out any available oxygen from the auditorium), but studios are, and they’re going to react.

The end result is a PART 1 movie that doesn’t really have a true PART 2, at least in my opinion.  FINAL RECKONING would instead have to carve a slightly different path…

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING (2025)

Directed by: Christopher McQuarrie

Written by: Christopher McQuarrie, Erik Jendresen

Starring: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Henry Czerny, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Shea Whigham

Released: May 23, 2025

Length: 170 minutes

It’s fitting, and perhaps a little telling, that the final stunt (at least for now) in the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE franchise involves Tom Cruise having to bail from a plane that can no longer land.  The plane winds up in bad shape, but it’s a major accomplishment, and frankly kind of a miracle, that Hunt walks away alive.

FINAL RECKONING is a bit of an odd duck.  No longer DEAD RECKONING PART 2, you can feel it distancing itself from its immediate predecessor.  All that stuff about Ethan and Gabriel’s paths crossing all those years ago?  It’s hand-waved away, implied to just be the catalyst for Ethan’s recruitment to the IMF and nothing more.  There’s a lot of work to connect individual loose threads from throughout the franchise (the Rabbit’s Foot from M:I III is finally identified), but the big fan-favorite cast reunion that felt inevitable never materializes.  The big returning cast member would turn out to be not Jeremy Renner, not Rebecca Ferguson, not Vanessa Kirby, not Maggie Q but…Rolf Saxon*!  The CIA analyst from the 1996 initial caper!  Anyone?

*Oh, and Angela Bassett, whose Erika Slone has graduated from CIA director to President of the United States.  But that messes up my joke, so let’s just roll with it.

Now, I’m not one of those that thinks every single aspect of a hero’s backstory needs to be specifically laid out, explained, or explored, especially when they’re making it from from movie to movie anyway (one would argue that getting into backstory at all is a complete affront to the Mission: Impossible television series modus operandi in the first place).  And, frankly, Rolf rocks in FINAL RECKONING!  He deserves his major moment he’ll inevitably get after this.  I would much rather get a well-chosen unintuitive returning guest star than for MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE to try to have its own ENDGAME “portal” moment.  But you do get this definitive sense that the original exit plan the franchise had drawn up for itself was scuttled a tad.

This doesn’t mean I didn’t like DEAD RECKONING; I actually had a pretty great time, even during the more talky and desperate sections.  I think I had anticipated something a lot cornier and creakier, although I do have a certain tolerance for this type of storytelling.  I derive great enjoyment from watching mega-franchises tie themselves into knots trying to connect various unrelated dots*.  The Rabbit’s Foot was the original code for the Entity?  Sure!  Shea Whigham is actually Jon Voight’s son?  Why not!

*It’s why I get a certain sick pleasure from the original series finale of THE X-FILES spending its first hour going “actually, the mythology makes sense, see?”  Yes, dance for me!)

At the end of the day, though, THE FINAL RECKONING is built off of its two major setpieces, each of which on its own blows any other modern-day actioner out of the water.   The first, which pays off the sunken submarine, set up all the way back at the beginning of DEAD RECKONING, is probably the more original of the two, performed in near silence and with stakes painstakingly set up beforehand, with a gruesome primer on what will occur to Ethan once he attempts to emerge from his deep sea dive (devastating cramps, decompression sickness, a near-certain chance of actual drowning).  Little wonder why the consensus is that FINAL RECKONING picks up around here; after a fairly dialogue-heavy first hour, here comes a sequence that serves as an exercise in patient, wordless storytelling.

The second and final sequence is Ethan and Gabriel’s dogfight in the air, intercut with the rest of the team trying desperately to put everything into place for an Entity trap, as well as President Sloane’s impossible decision: does the United States sacrifice several major cities across the world (including one of their own) in order to stop the Entity from gaining the Earth’s nuclear armament?  

With all of these interlayered conflicts, you can’t help but think of FALLOUT’s very similar (and probably superior) finale.  But, goddamnit, the aerial fight looks so good, and harrowing: just watching Cruise hang from the wing, thousands of miles up in the air was enough to trigger a million little anxieties within me.  It taps into MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE’s core magic: you know it’s a trick, that the stunts themselves are stunts (“watch a man die!”, the marketing has screamed for a decade).  You know it’s a lie.  But you can’t bear to look away, y’know, just in case it’s not.  That’s movies.

There are moments of odd humor here and there, none more memorable than Gabriel’s ultimate demise, which plays out not unlike the famous dril tweet:

But I’m also a fan of the cold open’s conclusion, which features Ethan brutally killing bad guys offscreen, and Grace doing an audition reel’s worth of reaction shots.  It’s messy; MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE has never featured a joke this cartoony in thirty years.  But it gets away with it due to Hayley Atwell being the most underrated movie star we have right now, and Tom Cruise’s ability to have chemistry with any living creature.  The moment makes you yearn for them to reunite for a movie that was able to be lighter on its feet.

The movie’s actual final moments may be disappointing to some who were hoping for some definitive deaths and exits from the franchise; the final moment of everyone merely going their separate ways leaves the door open just a bit for a Part 9 if everyone decides down the road that they’re game.  It’s also worth pointing out that this kind of coda has been done before, perhaps most memorably in GHOST PROTOCOL.

On the other hand, the major deaths in Part 7 and 8 haven’t been the most elegant things the franchise ever did, either.  Take Luther’s death in FINAL RECKONING, a moment that should have felt poignant and heartbreaking, is set up so oddly that you mostly just wonder if maybe you missed something.  Why is he in a hospital room?  Is Luther sick, or did he suffer some sort of offscreen injury?  Wait, is the hospital room in a dungeon?  It’s just odd and clunky, to the point that my wife ended up having to Google if Ving Rhames had died during filming or something.  It overshadows the exit of the only cast member not named Tom Cruise to appear in all eight films.

Still, I don’t think FINAL RECKONING is nearly as disappointing as advertised.  It’s just a really hard plane to land, especially given the stakes, the public nature of the franchise, and the competing needs of its stars, studio and audience.  The fact that it’s not a catastrophe is a real victory.  That I found it frequently as entertaining as ever is, frankly, a miracle.

Final Rankings

1. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION

2. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - GHOST PROTOCOL

3. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT

4. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE

5. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING

6. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING

7. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2

8. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III