Nobody does it like Tom Cruise. After establishing himself as a gifted leading man more than four decades ago, the timeless Hollywood star (once destined for the priesthood, lest we forget) reinvented his career at the turn of the century to become one of the industry’s premier action heroes.
That title still holds true in 2022, thanks in large part to the continued appeal of Paramount Studios’ mega-popular — and seemingly never-ending — Mission: Impossible franchise, which is gearing up to welcome a few more Cruise-led contributions (both nicknamed Dead reckoning) in the coming years.
In celebration of the stuntman and actor’s 60th (sixtieth!) birthday this month — and following the stratospheric success of Cruise’s latest action-packed release, Top Gun: Maverick — we’ve decided to take the approach-impossible mission: ranking all six missions: Impossible movies, from worst to best. Start the theme music…
Table of Contents
6. Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)
Anything but last place for Mission: Impossible 2 would have spelled the end of this writer’s career, but director John Woo’s zany sequel to Brian De Palma’s 1996 original still holds an odd, hard-to-justify place in the hearts of many franchise fans.
The film opens with limp-haired Cruise dangling — about 2,000 feet in the air — from a precarious rock face on the edge of Utah’s Dead Horse Point, which immediately sets the tone for the antics to come. Returning to the lowlands, series hero Ethan Hunt is tasked with stopping rogue agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) from spreading a deadly virus on the people of Australia, whose antidote he intends to sell to the highest bidder.
So all pretty standard Mission: Impossible fare – except Mission: Impossible 2 is about as ridiculous as action movies come. Woo’s signature Hong Kong cinematic style (think hyper-stylized imagery and excessive use of slow-motion sequences) is apparent at almost every turn, smothering the viewer with more guitar riffs and gunfights than can reasonably be digested in an average two-hour period. It’s all either hilariously hilarious or mind-numbingly chaotic, depending on who you ask – unfortunately for Woo, most moviegoers thought the latter.
5. Mission: Impossible (1996)
Scarface director Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible launched the now-famous franchise in 1996, and while objectively a fun adventure, it’s also the least good Mission: Impossible of all the Mission: Impossible films .
The film finds Cruise’s Hunt framed for the murder of his IMF (Impossible Mission Force) team during a botched mission in Prague and accused of selling government secrets to an arms dealer known only as “Max”. Jon Voight, Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny, Emmanuelle Béart, and Jean Reno also make appearances as various allies and nemesis.
Make no mistake, Mission: Impossible features some downright iconic action sequences – the restaurant-aquarium explosion, the vault infiltration mission, and so on – but the film seems to be a victim of its own success when compared with later franchises. Compares entries that up the ante and more.
4. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)
If you watch the Mission: Impossible films in order, Rogue Nation, the fifth installment in the series, is the first to lack its own distinct sense of identity. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as it serves as a sequel to the excellent Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, but you’ll be forgiven if you’re having trouble distinguishing between Rogue Nation and the three most recent outings in the series.
That aside, the movie is still a total eye-catcher, in which Hunt and his IMF team are threatened by a mysterious terrorist organization called the Syndicate. Led by Sean Harris’ Solomon Lane, this highly skilled group (or villain nation, *wink*) forces the film’s gang of heroes to perform some seriously outlandish stunts, including a phenomenal motorcycle chase through the streets of Morocco, a spellbinding underwater sequence, and of course, a now immortalized scene, in the Cruise hangs on the side of a cargo plane.
Everything is set to 11 in Rogue Nation, and while the film’s tongue-in-cheek humor may not appeal to everyone, it raised the bar for the series’ adrenaline-pumping action.
3. Mission: Impossible 3 (2006)
The most serious and potentially divisive film in the Mission: Impossible franchise, JJ Abrams’ Mission: Impossible 3 was the first in the series to truly leave audiences fearing for the life and happiness of its seemingly invincible hero, Ethan Hunt.
Playing more like a Bond or Bourne film than the previous two Mission: Impossible films, this film finds Cruise’s Hunt on the verge of a quiet life with fiancé Julia (Michelle Monaghan) as the elusive Owen Davian (the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) lends a hand. emerges with plans to unleash a mysterious chemical weapon on the world.
Hoffman is without a doubt the most compelling Mission: Impossible villain of them all, and what the third entry in the series lacks in explosive action – aside from the excellent bridge sequence and skyscraper pivot jump – it more than makes up for. biting tension. For her part, Monaghan is brilliant too, bringing a much-needed emotional core to a franchise that risks becoming superficial.
2. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol set the tone for the franchise as it exists today, introducing audiences to a new level of action and a particular charm of Mission: Impossible that values teamwork and camaraderie rather than the individual Feats of a One Man Laid -Army Ethan Hunt.
In this fourth entry, Hunt and the entire IMF are blamed—and disavowed—for the Kremlin bombing, leaving the villainous Michael Nyqvist free to pursue his plans for global nuclear war. If this storyline sounds conventional and, more broadly, unremarkable, that’s because it is, but Ghost Protocol manages to make enough meaningful emotional entries to keep audiences interested in the characters set on the Run, jump and hit screen through various exotic locations.
Ghost Protocol’s trump card, however, is its absolutely ridiculous Burj Khalifa sequence, in which Hunt sees rappelling, climbing, and jumping around the world’s tallest building. As was customary throughout his career, Cruise himself performed the gravity-defying stunts that many consider to be the best — if not the best – in the entire Mission: Impossible franchise.
1. Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)
Most lists of this nature have the series’ newest entry, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, at number one, and as much as we’d like to go against the tide, it’s hard to argue against the sheer Mission: Impossible-ness of the rogue Nation’s successor by director Christopher McQuarrie.
The film finds Hunt and company on a mission to stop the Apostles, a new terrorist organization (founded by former Syndicate members) whose doomsday mission depends on acquiring stolen plutonium cores. A CIA agent (Henry Cavill) and an arms dealer (Vanessa Kirby) join the fun as new friends (or enemies?), while Michelle Monaghan’s Julia returns to add a healthy dose of nostalgia to the mix.
Again, this synopsis might read as quintessential Mission: Impossible fodder, but Fallout combines the best elements of the five previous films in the series into a chaotic, gripping, and surprisingly emotional adventure that ranks as the most entertaining yet. In all honesty, you’ll have a hard time picking a favorite moment from the film’s two-and-a-half hour runtime (we settled on the bathroom fight sequence), which says something about its unrelenting quality.
The Mission: Impossible films aren’t the only films to make the TechRadar rankings over the past few weeks. Whether you want to know all 25 Pixar films (prior to the release of Lightyear) or the myriad of Marvel movie villains, our lists aim to separate the treasure from the garbage when it comes to the most popular (and controversial) in pop culture goes ) entertainment franchise.
