I Watched and Ranked All of the 'Mission Impossible' Movies, Which I Wouldn't Recommend
A supposedly fun series I'll never watch again.
Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the late aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.
—
What’s the point of ranking the Mission Impossible movies against each another? It was a question I asked myself early on in my 18-hour marathon of mediocre action thrillers starring Tom Cruise, and often thereafter. Eventually it became a sunk-cost fallacy, where I felt like I’d come too far to turn back, but the basic question still pinged around in my head.
I’m far from the only movie writer doing it, and at this point I’m probably late in the game. It’s an obvious idea, but also a stupid one. Maybe that’s my wheelhouse? The stupider and more pointless an idea seems, the more I want to do it. It’s why I tasted all 35 of the Cheesecake Factories cheesecakes and made a documentary about the Gathering of the Juggalos.
Is watching all of the Mission Impossible movies the cinema equivalent of eating 35 cheesecakes? Sort of, if eating 35 cheesecakes also took 18 interrupted hours. As The New Yorker’s Richard Brody put it in a tweet, “Overrate one Mission: Impossible, underrate another; it's like wine connoisseurs savoring motor oil for years and suddenly turning fussy.”
And yet the franchise has spanned 30 years, which makes it an interesting journey through the history of mainstream appetites and the corporate assumptions about same, even if the individual movies only range from about a C- to a B+. The Mission Impossible movies are both great exemplars of “the movies” without any single one of them actually holding up that well as a movie.
The Ten-Dimensional Chess Era
On a superficial level, The Mission Impossible franchise is a fun (if wildly padded) flipbook of Tom Cruise’s evolving hair and face. On a slightly deeper level, the Mission Impossible franchise, which began as an attempt to capitalize on the brand value of a then-30-year-old television series, both presaged and eventually harkened back to what I like to call the “10-dimensional chess” era of action filmmaking. It was a time when a twisty-turny plot with more double, triple, and quadruple crosses than anyone (or, this reviewer, anyway) could ever follow became a standard feature of the blockbuster.
At a certain point, it became conventional wisdom that the more a filmmaker could confuse you, the better he was. It’s fitting that Christopher McQuarrie, the guy who wrote The Usual Suspects (1995) wound up as the chief auteur of the franchise (which is to say, the only director to direct more than one installment). The genius of The Usual Suspects is that it’s more complex in retrospect than it is in the moment. It’s not so much confusing at is it is sly. And yet the success of that, and later Memento (2000) both seem like watershed moments in the life cycle of the 10-Dimensional Chess Era.
The Usual Suspects looks more like The Sixth Sense (classical Hitchcockian suspense with a big reveal at the end) than many of its descendants. But as these storytelling trends filtered down from the indie world into the mainstream, at a certain point it sort of became “more complicated better.” Remember bad guys who get caught on purpose? That’s the 10-Dimensional Chess Era. While it’s always fun to bag on Armond White’s (now of the National Review) convoluted takes and absurd prose, I must grant him credit for a line in his New York Press review of Inception (2010): “Like ‘Grand Theft Auto’s’ quasi-cinematic extension of noir and action-flick plots, ‘Inception’ manipulates the digital audience’s delectation for relentless subterfuge.”
Strip away the grandiloquent prose and curmudgeonly penchant for lumping together any new thing the youngs like that grandad Armond hates, and he was at least dead right about “the audience’s delectation for relentless subterfuge.”
“Relentless subterfuge” is Mission Impossible in a nutshell. While I’d imagined that the plotting of these films got more complicated as the budgets swelled, the lore deepened, and appetites changed, it was striking to go back and realize that I couldn’t really follow the plot of any of them, going all the way back to the very first (it was fun to remember that that one was directed by Brian Fucking De Palma). If the franchise is remembered for anything, it will probably be for turning Tom Cruise into the unofficial international global ambassador for movie magic, and giving us headlines like “Tom Cruise breaks world record for most burning parachute jumps.”
All that stuff is great, and the franchise truly gave us some of the best stunts ever filmed. And yet even that doesn’t make the individual films that much fun to watch in their entirety. They all mostly start strong, then start to drag about an hour in and nearly put you to sleep with endless pointless twists, and then finally hopefully pick back up in the end with another great stunt. It was mostly all those twists that made this rewatch more of a chore than a vacation. Here’s to hoping we can keep great the great stunts and larger-than-life stars, and leave the relentless subterfuge in the past.
If the 1996-2025 period has taught us anything, it’s that people’s motives are rarely very complicated, and absolutely no one is thinking more than one step ahead about anything.
—
8. Mission Impossible III (2006)
Director: JJ Abrams.
Babe: Michelle Monaghan
Tom Cruise Hairstyle: Sort of newscaster cool, one of the best of the series.
How well you like a Mission Impossible movie, or really any movie, depends in large part on whether the director is your speed. Cards on the table here, I think I hate JJ Abrams. Super 8, his Star Wars movie — like a root canal for me. MI3 is mostly the same. From the first frames, it looks overlit, washed out, and grainy compared to its two predecessors (directed by Brian De Palma and John Woo, respectively) which are both gorgeous. Half the shots look like someone is holding a flashlight under their chin to tell a campfire story.
Even worse, Abrams’ ugly frames tend to move in annoying swish pans, even when the camera isn’t shaking around during every action sequence. The style feels very influenced by 24 and the frantic, “gritty” style of basically everything from the War on Terror years. People forget how much that sucked, but let me tell you: it did.
M3 did have Philip Seymour Hoffman as the main heavy and Tom Cruise looking aspirationally handsome at 43 or 44. His hair goes from a tight little crewcut in the first movie (very functional for a compact superspy who’s always running and jumping and swimming!) to a preposterous Prince Valiant in the second (kind of delightfully absurd) and lots of shaggier cuts in the later movies. This one feels like a happy medium. Sadly that’s the best thing about it. Hoffman doesn’t even show up for like an hour. Cruise also got his teeth “fixed” between MI2 and this one, and so they look more like bland generic veneers, getting whiter but losing the distinctive character his more natural ones gave him.
The two most lasting elements of this one ended up being Michelle Monaghan’s character, who Ethan Hunt actually married, who keeps showing up in flashbacks in all of the McQuarrie ones. I suppose it figures: MI3 is actually more like a wildly unconvincing rom-com than an action thriller for most of its run time.
Its other curious legacy was trying to make the “one character who turns out to be another when he rips off his mask” trope more realistic. Abrams attempted this by adding the wrinkle that the masks were created by some sophisticated 3D printer. And also that the IMF team could mimic another character’s voice too, by taping some fancy computer doohickey over their throats. This was a terrible idea that both cheapened the cheesy fun of ripping off a mask, Scooby Doo style, and led to lazy storytelling, where the Impossible Mission Force didn’t even have to come up with a reason for the masked guy not to talk. Dumb.
7. MI7, aka Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
Director: Christopher McQuarrie.
Good Babe(s): Hayley Atwell, Rebecca Ferguson.
Bad Babe(s): Hayley Atwell, Vanessa Kirby, Pom Klementieff.
Tom Cruise Hairstyle: Buzzier version of the cool newscaster from MI3, again one of the better ones.
MI7 and MI8 were originally supposed to film back to back until COVID shut down production, and this one was always intended as part one of a two-parter. While it looks much better than MI3, it’s otherwise mostly better off forgotten, a wildly-padded first half of what probably should’ve been one film stretched into an insanely bloated 163 minutes. The bad guy was a super-powered AI that was somehow in cahoots with Esai Morales. AI sucks, but it’s not a great movie bad guy. This one lost me early on and I was mostly just bored the whole time. This desert gunfight that opens the film is one of the worst scenes of the series.
Turns out, filming a sniper from six different angles in the same scene actually doesn’t make it more exciting. I hate an action scene where you only find out what happened after the fact. “Oh cool, let me just travel back in time and tell myself to be excited.”
6. MI4, aka Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011)
Director: Brad Bird.
Good Babe: Paula Patton.
Bad Babe: Lea Seydoux.
Tom Cruise Hairstyle: Sort of an elongated shag meets early-90s Trent Reznor. Not the worst of the series, but close.
Brad Bird’s vivid color palette and rich compositions in the fourth movie were actually a dream after JJ Abrams grainy, swoopy sludge in the third. Ghost Protocol also has some of the most effective slapstick of the series, and is arguably the most genuinely funny one, where the latter half tends to lean smart-alecky but not actually humorous. MI3 gave us Simon Pegg, MI4 actually let him do enjoyably Simon Pegg things. After this he became mostly a vestigial appendage.
This was the one that introduced Jeremy Renner’s character (great addition) and had the big stunt with Tom Cruise dangling off of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. That whole sequence is fantastic, as is the Russian prison break that opens the film. But God, so much running and chasing. If you think you enjoy watching Tom Cruise running (which I do!), this one is like your dad catching you smoking cigarettes and then punishing you by making you finish the whole pack. The second half drags terribly, and the big stunt at the end, set on some kind of car elevator, feels more effective as a BMW commercial than as movie magic.
5. MI5, aka Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015)
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Good/Bad Babe: Rebecca Ferguson
Tom Cruise Hairstyle: Stylish newscaster + modified mullet back.
On paper, Rogue Nation has a lot going for it. Christopher McQuarrie’s first Mission Impossible movie, this one has one of the best bad guys (Sean Harris, previously of The Borgias), introduces all-time great Mission Impossible babe Rebecca Ferguson, and opens with one of the franchises most memorable stunts — Tom Cruise clinging to the side of a cargo plane, which seems to be going really fast, based on Tom Cruise’s hair. It also has Alec Baldwin as the CIA director, Jeremy Renner is still involved, plus a handful of other memorable-face character actors as various British guys (Simon McBurney, Tom Hollander). It’s probably my favorite of the franchise in terms of cast and I go back and forth about whether it should go higher.
Possibly in an attempt to close the can of worms JJ Abrams opened with his voice-changing microchips and 3D-printed face masks, Rogue Nation introduced a new security measure: gait analysis.
That’s where a high-tech computer analyzes how a dude walks to make sure he’s not actually Tom Cruise or Simon Pegg wearing a 3D-printed mask of that dude’s face and a voice-changing throat sticker. It all makes an idiotic sort of sense, which is the best kind of Mission Impossible plot device.
Meanwhile, Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust is taking bad guys down and choking them with her thighs, which is about the closest the Mission Impossible series ever gets to being “sexy.” (Usually it’s sort of a radio-edit version of James Bond, where instead of drinking martinis and bedding down countless babes, Ethan Hunt mostly just does calisthenics and writes them gushy love letters).