Mission: Eight Times Impossible
In which I watch, rank and review all 8 Mission: Impossible movies so that you don't have to
Introduction
Recently, my husband and I had a bright idea: why not show our twelve-year-old the first Mission: Impossible movie? Neither of us had seen it in years, and given our son’s taste in films, we thought he might like it – and, indeed, he did. But in the course of watching, I was struck by a second, much more questionable idea: why not watch all eight Mission: Impossible movies in order? Though I’d seen the first five films at one time or another, I’d missed the subsequent three, and having reacquainted myself with the first one, I felt moved to see how they held up in sequence.
Sensibly, both my son and my husband opted for only partial participation, due almost entirely to the fact that Mission: Impossible II is famously terrible. I saw it in cinemas when it first released, and even at age 14, I knew it was trash. But that was twenty-five years ago, and while I didn’t believe that it would’ve improved with age, I thought it might at least be mildly funny. Which is what gave me the idea to review the films as I went: if I was going to subject myself to something I already knew was bad, I might as well get something out of it. And besides, I reasoned, there’s no way any of the later films can possibly be worse than the second one.
Right?
Oh, how wrong I was.
Mission: Impossible (1996)
Directed By: Brian de Palma
Written By: David Koepp and Robert Towne
Run Time: 110 minutes
Tom Cruise’s Age: 34
Review: A camp spy thriller that remains a delight to watch. Tom Cruise’s first crack at IMF Agent Ethan Hunt renders him cocky and charming by turns, while his moments of flirtation with arms dealer Max – played to fantastic effect by Vanessa Redgrave – are an understated highlight. Henry Czerny as Agent Kittridge and John Voight as Jim Phelps both chew a delightful amount of scenery, and the central heist scene, which sees Cruise/Hunt descending from a ceiling vent to steal the film’s MacGuffin from a sound-, temperature- and pressure-sensitive vault, remains iconic. Interestingly, and in contrast to how dated it feels to see data stored on floppy discs and early CDs – to say nothing of Usenet being presented as the functional entirety of the public internet – the futuristic spy gadgets have aged surprisingly well. Video-screen watches, for instance, though wholly fictional in 1996, are now commonplace, while in the climactic denoument aboard the TGV, Max’s attempt to upload the stolen NOC list is thwarted, first by Ving Rhames’s Luther jamming her wireless signal, and then by the train itself entering a tunnel: a familiarly frustrating experience for anyone who’s ever attempted to use the spotty, complimentary wifi on public transport.
Pros: With a runtime of less than two hours, the film is compact, pacey and well-structured, with very few dips in momentum. At the same time, while the story is packed with reveals and double-crosses, the simplicity of the core conceit – Hunt’s drive to prove his innocence by unmasking the mole and safeguarding the NOC list – ensures that the various twists and turns never become incomprehesible or self-defeating.
Cons: Kristin Scott Thomas is criminally underutilized, and as fun as it is to watch, the entire climactic helicopter-yoked-to-a-train-and-flying-in-a-tunnel sequence is also deeply silly.
Rating: 8/10
Mission: Impossible II (2000)
Directed By: John Woo
Written By: Robert Towne
Run Time: 124 minutes
Tom Cruise’s Age: 38
Review: In the second half of Mission: Impossible II, there’s a sene where a gun-toting Tom Cruise, preceded by a single white dove in flight, walks through a burning doorway in slowmo to the sound of flamenco music. While there are certainly action films that could pull off this kind of aesthetic, Mission: Impossible II is not among them. Everything in this movie, from the rock remix version of Lalo Schifrin’s iconic theme song to the profusion of douchbag glasses, is trying so painfully hard to be cool that the impact is that of a tweenage edgelord wearing a leather trenchcoat two sizes too big while insisting on being called Neo. In fact, the general vibe is not so much spy thriller as James Bond meets – or attempts to meet – The Matrix. Thandie Newton as Nyah and Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt give mutually stilted, wooden performances, and while much of that can be blamed on the combination of a terrible script and excerable direction, both are nonetheless capable of better. That Ian McKellan evidently declined the cameo role of Mission Commander Swanbeck in order to play Magneto while Dougray Scott turned down Wolverine in favour of playing lead villain Sean Ambrose is a deeply ironic parallel, to say nothing of representing a net win for 2000’s X-Men, which is unequivocally the better and more lastingly relevant film. Forget so bad it’s good; this is just plain bad.
Pros: With his floppy late 90s haircut, Tom Cruise looks pleasingly like a futch lesbian, while his scenes with Thandie Newton evoke nothing so much as the performatively-cocky-yet-submissively-breedable energy of Dean Winchester in S1 of Supernatural. There’s also a lot of weirdly homoerotic banter, particularly but not exclusively between Sean Ambrose and his second in command. Ordinarily, I’d make a feast of these two things, but it’s a testament to how bad the surrounding film is that I still went away hungry.
Cons: You want to trick a scientist? Mask of another guy’s face. Can’t be in two places at once? Mask of another guy’s face. Need a quick way to make the bad guy shoot his own henchman? Believe it or not, also mask of another guy’s face. And that’s not even touching on the mid-air motorcycle collision, the largely nonsensical plot, or the consistent abuse of slow-mo.
Rating: 2.5/10
Mission: Impossbible III (2006)
Directed By: J.J. Abrams
Written By: Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and J.J. Abrams
Run Time: 126 minutes
Tom Cruise’s Age: 44
Review: In my final year of high school, my favourite teacher once told our class that you were most likely to be awarded top marks in the end of year exams if your mildly competent essay was marked after a string of very bad ones, such that yours would look incredible by comparison. This was a humorous statement, and yet it was also honest, as it acknowledged that our grades could be influenced by factors beyond our control. Similarly, I can’t help but feel that much of the critical praise that accrued to Mission: Impossible III was indelibly flavoured by how bad its immediate predecessor was. Which isn’t to say that III is a bad film – far from it. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laurence Fishburne excel as villain Owen Davian and IMF boss Theodore Brassel respectively; Simon Pegg gives great comedic relief as helpul tech guy Benji; Ving Rhames continues to be great as recurring character Luther; and Michelle Monaghan is charmingly plausible as Ethan Hunt’s new adrenaline-loving nurse fiancee-slash-wife, Julia. Similarly, the film’s cold open, which jumps us ahead in time to a tense, climactic showdown between Davian and a captive Hunt before rewinding to show how the story reached that point, is incredibly effective, not least because it firmly establishes a return to decent acting.
But while there’s some surprisingly good dialogue and a few fun moments with the ensemble cast, the plot is essentially reheating the franchise-thus-far’s nachos, taking the most compelling elements of the previous two films – Hunt’s team being set up and betrayed by an IMF mole while dealing with a charismatic arms dealer from the first, an imperiled love interest and a race to contain a rogue bioweapon from the second – and combining them in a new format. Though there’s some decent action sequences, individually, none of them rises to the level of iconic, while collectively, they start to feel like a slog. But in one key respect, the film is an unadulerated success, namely: getting the franchise back in the saddle after a dismal prior offering. And really, what more can we ask for?
Pros: While the film’s central emotional arc leans heavily on Ethan Hunt playing the hero to Julia’s damsel in distress, there’s a refreshing amount of care put into making Julia feel like a real, three-dimensional person in her own right. She has family, friends, a job, hobbies, and at the denoument, she’s granted sufficient agency both to save Ethan’s life with her professional skills and to kill some guys after a quick tutorial in his, which is more than many such movies bother to offer. Also, it’s a surprisingly bold and clever choice to never actually tell us what the MacGuffin – an unknown bioweapon referred to throughout as the Rabbit’s Foot – actually does, leaning instead on the horror of implication.
Cons: While more action flick than spy thriller, enough of the latter’s DNA is embedded in the premise that the lack of actual geopolitics feels conspicuous. Davian is an arms dealer, but the identity of his buyers is never mentioned; we jump from Berlin to Vatican City to Shanghai, but none of these locations is actually relevant in terms of their specifics except as set dressing. Though the first film was also light on big picture detail, the narrower framing made it work: here, though, the story casts a wide net that catches very little, which ultimately serves to make the traitor’s reveal both contextually illogical and strangely underwhelming.
Rating: 7/10
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)
Directed By: Brad Bird
Written By: Josh Applebaum and André Nemec
Run Time: 133 minutes
Tom Cruise’s Age: 49
Review: Ghost Protocol is a deeply uneven mess. Though it gets off to something of a rocky start, thanks largely to the hammy, stilted acting of Paula Patton as Jane and Josh Holloway as her soon-to-be-dead colleague-slash-paramour, Hanaway, it picks up around the 15-20 minute mark. There’s actual geopolitical framing – in both senses of the word, as a rogue villain is trying to frame the IMF to cover up their theft of nuclear launch codes – and, in the first half, some decent action/spy sequences. Most notably, Tom Cruise’s Ethan and Simon Pegg’s Benji infiltrating the Kremlin is quite good fun (though also deeply silly, in that a key part of the plan relies on a specific guard repeatedly getting up to check a fake tap dripping noise), as is Hunt’s subsequent flight from a wry Russian agent attempting to arrest him in the aftermath of a bombing for which he’s been wrongly blamed, and which sees the entire IMF team disavowed.
Which is also where the film starts to unravel: though Cruise-as-Hunt scaling the outside of the Burj Khalifa certainly makes for a striking visual, both the villian and his motive are insufficiently well-developed to generate any narrative momentum. As the plot thins, the pacing slows, with the back half of the film leaning heavily on the operational troubles faced by Hunt’s team – as opposed to any actual plot developments – to pad out the runtime. The practical upshot of this is fifty-odd minutes of Oh No, The Fancy Technology Isn’t Working Properly And We Don’t Have Enough Intel, which then devolves into a chase scene in a sandstorm. Still, this might’ve been bearable if the interpersonal beats were stronger, but as Jane – and thus Paula Patton’s terrible acting – are loadbearing in the second half, the whole thing takes on the flavour of This Meeting Could’ve Been An Email. The icing on the cake is a final, bizarre fight between Hunt and the villain in some kind of car tower, where the villain – bafflingly – appears to commit suicide; at the least, he dies in an entirely stupid and self-directed manner for no good reason, thereby cementing him as a paper-thin and poorly-written foil. As such, and while enlivened by a handful of bright spots, the film overall is a slog that fails to live up to its potential.
Pros: There’s a Ving Rhames cameo at the end, and throughout the film, we’re drip-fed information about what happened to Julia, Hunt’s wife in the previous instalment. First, we’re told they broke up; then, we learn that Julia died, an operational failure for which Brandt, played by Jeremy Renner, blames himself. But at the finale, Hunt reveals to Brandt, evidently as a sap to his guilt, that Julia is still alive; they had to fake her death and separate in order to keep her safe from Hunt’s enemies. While this ultimately raises more questions than it answers, the fact that the film bothered to acknowledge Julia’s absence at all, let alone do something more creative with it than simply fridging her, is a point in its favour. Also, the Russian agent who tails Hunt from Moscow is great, if underused.
Cons: Though the film contains a non-zero amount of Russian dialogue, none of it was subtitled. Possibly this was an issue specific to the version I watched on Amazon Prime, or possibly not; Googling about it has yielded no definitive answer. Either way, it was deeply annoying. Also, the sleazy-horny Indian businessman Jane has to seduce in Mumbai is so grossly stereotypical as to be cringeworthy.
Rating: 5/10
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)
Directed By: Christopher McQuarrie
Written By: Christopher McQuarrie
Run Time: 131 minutes
Tom Cruise’s Age: 53
Review: A perfectly serviceable – one might even say solid – film, which by the standard of the franchise to this point makes it top three material. Following on from the events of Ghost Protocol, which have caused quite a negative stir in Washington, the IMF is at risk of being disbanded and its assets absorbed into the CIA, which course is being urged by Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin), the CIA director. Ethan Hunt, however, is busy tracking an international crime syndicate – called, imaginatively enough, the Syndicate – who are already one step ahead of him. As Hunley refuses to believe that the Syndicate is real, Hunt et al – including recurring characters Benji, Brandt and Luther – go rogue to try and take it down, with Hunt being alternately aided and foiled by mysterious British agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), whose name is a very obvious reference to devils and deals made therewith, given her complex relationship with the Syndicate’s mastermind, Solomon Lane (Sean Harris).
Though the dialogue is cliched in parts and needlessly purple in others, the actors – notably Ferguson, Baldwin and Harris – are good enough to carry it anyway, while the plot is the strongest and most coherent offering since the original film. That one of the early action sequences takes place at a performance of Turandot is, one feels, a bit of deliberate lampshading: writer/director Christopher McQuarrie knows that he’s dabbling with camp, operatic melodrama under the guise of an action thriller, and is tipping his hat accordingly. As such, while several implausibly ridiculous things happen in the course of the film – most notably a sequence in which Ethan Hunt drowns, is shocked back to life, proceeds to drive at high speed in a car chase ending in what ought to be a fatal crash, only to crawl out, hop on a motorbike, resume the chase and then crash again – it never feels quite as stupid as it ought to, because the beats and framing of the film are working with soap opera logic.
And yet, despite all this, there’s still something faintly unmemorable about the film itself. Though I watched it when it originally came out, I had no memory of the plot, and even with it fresh in my mind, I can already feel the details of it sliding away. Which leads me to term it a popcorn movie in the trust sense, in that watching it feels like eating movie popcorn: satisfying in the moment, then immediately forgotten. Also, they catch the bad guy at the end by tricking him into a giant transparent cube, which they seemingly just happen to have on hand. What’s up with that?
Pros: Rebecca Ferguson is, as ever, absolutely brilliant, and particularly given the absent, flimsy villain in Ghost Protocol, it was nice to have a bad guy with some presence. By the same token, the fact that the plot is actually asking questions of the characters, whose motives are sufficiently fleshed out to put them in realstic conflict with one another, makes for a refreshing contrast to the previous film and its reliance on successive technical failures.
Cons: As the biggest, craziest stunt in the film – Tom Cruise hanging off the actual side of an actual cargo plane in actual flight – happens during the cold open, everything that comes after feels underwhelming by comparison, like going to see a commedian who tells their best joke in the first five minutes. Timing is a component of good execution, and this misses on that count. Similarly, while the central heist to steal classified information from a highly secure facility is in many ways a callback to the iconic infiltration scene from the original, the the whole thing feels profoundly less urgent than it ought to, because the stakes are implicitly lowered by the premise. As Hunt is breaking into an underwater vault without any breathing apparatus, the only possible outcomes are that he succeeds or dies, and as genre convention prohibits killing the franchise lead halfway through the film, the conclusion is somewhat foregone. In the original, by comparison, as the characters were at risk of getting trapped, caught or harmed in some other way, the tension – and thus the stakes – remained high.
Rating: 6.5/10
Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)
Directed By: Christopher McQuarrie
Written By: Christopher McQuarrie
Run Time: 147 minutes
Tom Cruise’s Age: 56
Review: In letter grade terms, this film is a solid D minus that someone has tried to pass off as a B plus. At first glance, there’s some joy to be had in the specter of continuity – Benji, Luther, Ilsa, Hunley, villain Solomon Lane and even – spoiler alert – Ethan’s ex-wife Julia are all back, while the plot is a direct continuation of the previous film – and the action sequences, while lengthy, are at least decently choreographed. But as with Mission: Impossible III, the franchise stands accused of reheating its own nachos, and this second spin in the metaphoric microwave has rendered them a mess of goopy cardboard.
Once again, we’ve got Ethan Hunt suspected-slash-disliked by the head of the CIA, only this time it’s Hunley’s replacement, Erika Sloane (Angela Basset); and by the same token, once again, we’ve got a mole-slash-traitor setting him up in the form of CIA Agent August Walker (Henry Cavill), a reveal that’s as predictable as it is boring. Once again, too, the threat is what remains of the Syndicate – now called the Apostles, although this is barely relevant – attempting to set off a nuclear bomb, though for ideologically shaky reasons that don’t make a lot of sense, more of which shortly. And once again – as in the previous film – we’ve got Ethan Hunt being forced by a mix of circumstance, hubris and agency disavowal to do, or at least to appear to do, the bidding of the bad guys, only to outsmart them later. Oh, and Max-from-the-first-film’s daughter and son are here, but they’re double agents, sort of? That part didn’t really make a lot of sense, either. It’s messy.
At base, however, the film fails because it’s nonsensical, albeit in a very specifically Hollywood way. Namely: the Apostles, led by John Lark/August Walker, want to destroy the existing world order, which means their motives are central to a good 80% of the film – but as making their ideology cogent would mean acknowledging the real critiques that exist to be made of American/Western geopolitics, what we get instead are periodic bursts of grandiose, self-contradictory word-slop that don’t remotely hold together. Lark/Walker’s manifesto, for instance, is built around the idea that, in order for there to be peace, there must first be pain, which is more in line with the sentiments of a 14 year old aspiring emo songwriter doodling in their notebook circa 2004 than an actual political stance. That his plan to achieve this pain involves detonating nukes at a glacier whose water feeds India, China and other large swathes of the global south is objectively insane, not just because the idea that pain is necessary in the first place is hanging together with spit and cellotape, but because his apparent beef with the existing world order is directed at Western leadership in general and American leadership in particular, not anyone the nukes are actually aimed at.
“I’m mad at people in Washington giving me bad orders and never explaining themselves; therefore, I will poison India!” is the kind of non-sequitur that could make sense if the script were willing to paint Walker as a white supremacist, but sans any grounding in actual real-world beliefs, the whole thing is comically stupid. What the film as a whole most reminds me of, in fact, is the Hollywood geopolitics version of those Satanic Panic era Evangelical PSAs depicting Dungeons & Dragons as a gateway to actual devil worship, in the sense of being so foundationally detached from the reality of the subject as to make the creator look crazy. In this case, while plenty of real-world ideologies exist that might, in their most extreme form, lead to a plan to detonate nukes in a major water source for the global south, some wibbly-wobbly supervillain nonsense about peace coming from pain is not among them.
Pros: The helicopter-on-helicopter chase scene at the finale is pretty fun to watch, and it’s nice that we get some closure re: where Julia is and what she’s up to.
Cons: It’s too long and nothing makes sense.
Rating: 4/10
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One (2023)
Directed By: Christopher McQuarrie
Written By: Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen
Run Time: 163 minutes
Tom Cruise’s Age: 61
Review: When I first set out review the entire Mission: Impossible franchise, I genuinely believed, whatever else might be said of these films, that none of the latter offerings could possibly be as bad as the second one. Dead Reckoning, however, proved me wrong. The script is atrocious, reminiscent of the very worst scenes in the original Matrix sequels, where characters like the Merovingian and the Architect deliver purple, self-important dialogue to camera with smugly flat expressions. It’s an overlong, nonsensical celebration of the worst excesses of the franchise, all geared around a plot that would’ve been overwrought and ridiculous twenty years ago, but which now packs all the cultural punch of a supermarket sandwich dropped from a toddler’s limp hand onto soiled carpet. Namely: the villain is a sentient military AI, called the Entity, that has escaped containment and is now wreacking havoc on Ethan Hunt et al, while the central MacGuffin – or MacGuffins, rather – are two halves of a key which, when united, are presumed to unlock… something, neither we nor the characters are precisely sure, that grants control of the Entity.
Why every relevant government knows that the key exists but not what it it does is never explained; we’re just meant to roll with it, the same way we’re meant to accept every other bit of narrative and emotional bullshit on offer. Pointedly, for a franchise that otherwise took decent care not to simply kill Hunt’s former love interest, Julia, it’s deeply disappointing that established character Isla Faust, played by Rebecca Ferguson, is killed off pointlessly midway through. That Hayley Atwell’s new hot lady character Grace is already on the scene making sadly conflicted heroine eyes at Hunt makes Ilsa’s loss feel all the tackier, as though she’s only being cleared out of the way like so much dead wood to make way for her successor. And then there’s the Entity itself: not only is it depicted on-screen as a pulsing white-on-blue circle reminiscent of early Windows Media Player visualisations, but whenever it’s mad, it growls, a sort of digital velociraptor noise that sounds like it was borrowed from one of the stupider Jurassic Park films.
Dead Reckoning is also – and this is truly unforgiveable – two hours and forty minutes long. Intellectually, I was aware of the run time before I started watching; in practice, there still came a point where, desperately bored, I paused the film to check how much was left. By then, all the characters were on a train, performing a series of elaborate double-crosses and bizarre stunts, which felt like it was driving towards a denouement. Surely, I thought, there could be only twenty-odd minutes to go at most? Wrong. A full hour yet remained, which I watched two nights later while drunk, because that seemed like the only way to get through it with my sanity still intact. I barely remembered what happened, and was still left dreading the sequel.
Pros: There’s a single fun chase scene where Ethan and Grace are fleeing down various streets in a comedically small car while inconveniently handcuffed and, at times, driving backwards. None of this is remotely original – the male/female spy duo forced to tandem drive while cuffed at the wrist was also memorably done in Tomorrow Never Dies, while multiple films have famously done the tiny European car zipping through tiny European streets bit – but it was, at the least, competently executed. Also, Kitteridge from the first film is back, I guess?
Cons: Literally everything else.
Rating: 1.5/10
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)
Directed By: Christopher McQuarrie
Written By: Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen
Run Time: 170 minutes
Tom Cruise’s Age: 63
Review: This is a genuinely bizarre film: it’s unquestionably bad, but in so many different – and, at times, weirdly contradictory – ways that it occasionally, briefly veers into okayness before ricocheting back into insanity. Meaning, in essence, that its few good moments are best described as the cinematic equivalent of stolen valor: narrative beats that are either striking recreations of the fruit of better movies, or the result of invoking an emotional connection to the strongest parts of the franchise’s previous offerings. Done with more care, this latter could’ve been a powerful technique; instead, it has the flavor of graverobbing, as almost every callback is so clumsily shoehorned into the current plot as to be both nonsensical and insulting.
All of which is explicable by the film’s single greatest problem: that McQuarrie thinks his audience is an idiot. Everything he thinks we need to know, no matter how obvious, is not only reiterated endlessly in the dialogue, but paired with a truly obscene number of flashback and flash forward scenes, just in case we still didn’t get the message. At the same time, the core plot is so profoundly stupid that he doesn’t even bother attempting to justify its most egregious assertions, presumably on the basis that he thinks the audience is too dumb to have questions. For instance: the entire film rests on the premise that the Entity can’t simply be turned off or destroyed, because this would destroy the whole entire internet – which the film unironically refers to as cyberspace – for everyone on Earth, thereby causing mass chaos and crashing the global economy; as though it would be impossible to either prepare for this ahead of time or, I don’t know, turn the fucking internet back on again. Either way, this outcome, which is absurd, is thereinafter framed as being just as bad as global nuclear war, which is also the Entity’s endgame plan to destroy humanity. Why? Periodically various characters ask the same question; no answer is ever provided. It’s because reasons.
The entire thing is so painfully, grimly dumb that, at a certain point, it’s hard to even be mad at the many lesser incongruities on offer, such as the fact that the CIA Director from the previous film, played by Angela Basset, is now the President, even though there’s only a two month timeskip between then and now; or the supposed past relationship between Hunt and villain Gabriel (Esai Morales), who was also in the previous film, that’s alluded to but never actually explained despite its apparent relevance; or Hunt’s decision to mentally connect with the Entity in a sort of weird upload box where it… shows him visions of the future, I guess? Because it can do that? Because we’re doing The Matrix again, for some reason.
By this point in the franchise, in fact, there’s been enough Matrix-esque nonsense that I truly do wonder if Tom Cruise just wanted an excuse to act out variations on his favourite scenes from 90s and 00s action movies he didn’t personally star in. Between this film and the previous one, we’ve got: recovering from near death in a special box with his sexy love interest (The Fifth Element) who appeared above him while he was drowning in a vision that also saved his life (The Two Towers) after planning to let the icy seawater freeze him in death and thus permit his resuscitation (The Abyss); doing a chase scene while handcuffed to a sexy love interest (Tomorrow Never Dies) while in a comedically small car that drives backwards through European streets (The Bourne Identity); exploring a sunken Russian submarine to stop a nuclear disaster (The World Is Not Enough); being told by an all-powerful computer that he is, quote, “the chosen one” (The Matrix: Revolutions); and hanging precariously off the side of a biplane (The Mummy).
It’s a highly derivative film, is what I’m getting at. Granted, big Hollywood action blockbusters aren’t generally known for their originality, but this felt even more on the nose than usual. And then there’s McQuarrie’s ham-fisted callbacks to previous films, which arguably began with the introduction of Alanna (Vanessa Kirby) and Zola (Frederick Schmidt), the adult children of arms dealer Max from the first film, back in Fallout, both of whom also appeared in Dead Reckoning, but not The Final Reckoning. Aside from Kitteridge being here and the allusion to Gabriel and Ethan’s shared past, which was introduced in Dead Reckoning and referenced again here without ever being explained, we’ve got a guy who turns out to be the now-adult son of Jim Phelps, aka Ethan’s old team-member who was the mole in the first movie, the revelation that the Entity was actually the Rabbit’s Foot from the third film, and the return of William Donloe (Rolf Saxon), the hapless programmer in the first film who lost his job after Hunt et al robbed the CIA on his watch.
Out of all of these, trying to reframe the Entity as the Rabbit’s Foot is perhaps the most egregious work of bullshit, for three reasons: firstly, because the original Rabbit’s Foot was very obviously meant to be a bioweapon; secondly, because it worked so well as a plot device precisely because we didn’t know what it was, which this retcon now ruins; and thirdly because, as bad as the sentient AI plot is in 2025, it becomes even stupider when you functionally backdate the Entity’s creation to the pre-AI era. The Donloe inclusion, by contrast, was actually quite neat: the original film has Kitteridge saying, out loud, that he wants Donloe manning a radar tower in Alaska by the end of the day, such that having him pop up at a remote island station in the Bering Sea tracks – and yet it feels profoundly less satisfying than it might, when lumped in with so many other clumsy attempts at shoehorning in the events of the previous films.
Pros: Donloe’s Inuk wife, Tapeesa (Lucy Tulugarjuk) is a personable addition, as is Donloe himself; and the climactic big stunt scene, wherein Tom Cruise hangs off multiple biplanes in midair before eventually jumping in a parachute that catches on fire, is both incredible to watch and categorically insane, given that he did it himself.
Cons: On the heels of Isla’s death in the previous film, there’s something deeply gross about Ving Rhames’s Luther being the one to die here to further Hunt’s manpain, to say nothing of how weirdly that death is positioned. By which I mean: while we twice see Luther in some kind of hospital bed, implying that he was already sick and/or dying prior to being blown up, this is never explained, nor do the other characters comment on it. Instead, it seems to exist entirely as a lazy post-hoc justification for Luther recording a moving “if you’re hearing this you’re alive and I’m dead” style voice memo that plays after Ethan saves the world, because otherwise, he would’ve had no reason to anticipate his own death. Also, with a run time of nearly three hours – a solid half hour of which involves Hunt swimming around in a sunken submarine with zero dialogue – the film is unforgiveably long.
Rating: 2/10
Conclusion
Across eight films, the Mission: Impossible franchise boasts three decent films, only one of which – the first – is truly good; two middling, unmemorable trashy action instalments; and three that are downright bad. When the films succeed, they do so with a combination of good characterisation, iconic action sequences and clever plots; when these elements are mishandled, the characters become wooden and interchangeable, the action sequences overlong and pointless, and the plots asinine. Though most of the continuity on offer is the work of Christopher McQuarrie, who’s responsible for four of the eight films, it’s used to notably poor effect, for the simple reason that most of the recurring characters are woefully underdeveloped. Though Ving Rhames renders Luther as funny, wry and warm by turns, with Simon Pegg lending Benji his trademark frenetic geek sidekick energy, neither character has any meat beyond this. Both were striking on introduction precisely because they were the tech guys in their respect first movies, emotionally and intellectually distinct from the rest of the cast while also filling a specific, much-needed role in their teams, not because they were blessed with much in the way of backstory. We know that Luther is a hacker who was once disavowed, and that Benji went to Oxford: that’s it – and for those two films, that’s all we really needed.
But when Benji is promoted to field agent in Ghost Protocol – a change made almost entirely, one suspects, because he and Luther couldn’t both be the genius tech savant – his character never meaningfully changes; or at least, not in any emotionally consistent way. He’s still the worried, antsy comic relief, still constantly telling Hunt that his crazy plans won’t work, right up until McQuarrie wants him to be a badass in the final film, at which point he’s suddenly talking someone else through field surgery to reinflate his collapsed lung while gasping out instructions to capture the Entity. But at no point in any of their respective films – eight for Luther, six for Benji – is either character actually developed as a person. Their skillsets are whatever the films require, and while, as mentioned, both actors portray them well, the characters themselves are so functionally hollow that, if you swapped them out for new guys each time, it wouldn’t make any real difference. The continuity, in other words, is wholly dependent on the audience recognising the actors, and not because Benji and Luther themselves are memorable creations.
Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust, by contrast, was McQuarrie’s best invention, being both expertly portrayed and sufficiently well-developed to steal every scene she was in. She was engaging precisely because she had both clear professional aims and personal quirks derived from her specific circumstances, all of which materially impacted her actions. She enlivened the plot with her choices, opposing or allying with Hunt depending on her own priorities while still remaining consistent; she was competent without being infallible, her motives wholly her own. That she was killed off in such a dull, pointless way – stabbed on a bridge – even as her replacement was already on deck was a maddeningly poor choice; so much so that it almost felt vindictive, as though McQuarrie was, for whatever reason, angry at the character or the actress. Either way, I was sorry to see her go. As for the introduction of Hayley Atwell’s Grace, given her status as a thief and McQuarrie’s obsession with rifling the earlier films for material, my abiding suspicion is that he wanted to bring back Thandie Newton’s Nyah – also a thief – from Mission: Impossible II, but was for whatever reason unable to do so. At the very least, it seems reasonable to assume that Grace’s character was inspired by Nyah, as both meet Hunt under weirdly similar circumstances.
It’s striking, too, that the films get longer as the franchise goes on – in fact, the only film not shorter than its immediate predecessor is Rogue Nation, which at 131 minutes to Ghost Protocol’s 133 barely counts – such that The Final Reckoning is a full hour longer than the original Mission: Impossible. In a very real way, it reads as a manifestation of Hollywood’s need to go bigger every time, where bigger very seldom means better. There are certainly some memorable action scenes and stunts throughout the franchise – indeed, one wonders at times if Tom Cruise either actively wants to die or believes himself immortal – but only a handful really stand out as memorable. There’s also, on balance, a gratuitous use and abuse of masks-of-other-people’s-faces – which, granted, is a signature bit of the franchise, but some films make notably better use of it than others, while the worst offenders act as if both the hero and the villain are constantly carrying around a quick-change sack of spare faces.
And then there’s the plots, which… look. If I’m being brutally honest, a big part of the reason why none of the subsequent films attains or surpasses the success of the first one is that, like the 1966 TV show on which it was based, the original was more in the line of an espionage/spy thriller with occasional action sequences than a straight-up action blockbuster. The iconic CIA vault infiltration scene works so well, not because it’s the product of life-endangering stuntwork, but because of the quiet, human tension of a good heist plot. Mission: Impossible III had elements of this, too, which is part of why it succeeded, but its strongest moments are all profoundly interpersonal: we care about Julia and her fate because the story does a great job of investing us in the mundane, charming reality of her friends, family and job, and we care about Hunt’s team because the script paints them as distinct individuals with their own histories and relationships. But these gracenotes are increasingly absent the deeper into the franchise we get, while the plots go from the cartoonish to the grandiose to the absurd, eventually culminating in an AI villain so ridiculous that it functionally changes the genre from bad action to bad science fiction.
When I set out to watch all eight films, my hope was that I’d have a good time. Instead, the whole thing quickly began to feel punitive, and by the end, it was an active chore to finish. And part of why, I suspect, is not just the failings of individual films, but the fact that none of them are really meant to be watched in sequence. Even once Christopher McQuarrie takes over and introduces a basic level of continuity – despite his continual, increasingly clumsy callbacks to the earlier films – he seems increasingly convinced that his audience either doesn’t or shouldn’t have to remember the previous films in any detail, leaning rather on a sort of nebulous, nostalgic association devoid of fresher context. Which would, aside from anything else, explain why The Final Reckoning is so flashback-heavy, committed to over-explaining its own references as if to an elderly relative who can’t be relied upon to remember what happened last week: he wants you to remember that you’ve seen the previous films and that what you’re viewing now is connected to them, but not much more than that.
Which… doesn’t really make for great viewing, frankly. If nothing else, it’s remarkable that Tom Cruise has been starring in the same action franchise from his thirties into his sixties, but at this point, his insane, increasingly life-threatening stuntwork feels not so much impressive as proof, were any required, that men really will do anything except go to therapy. And so, at the end of this arduous process, having subjected myself to a cumulative 1104 minutes – which is to say, almost eighteen and a half hours, christallfuckingmighty – of Mission: Impossible movies, the only advice I have is this: stick to the first one. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, the third and the fifth won’t kill you outright, but the rest – let alone all eight at once – are a mission no sensible person should choose to accept.