Let's rank the Mission: Impossible movies
1. Ghost Protocol
The best part of the best Mission isn’t Tom Cruise hanging off the side of the tallest building in the world. It’s not the dozen little moments that turned the Burj Khalifa sequence into one of the decade’s defining action setpieces: The elaborate exchange of money and activation codes on multiple floors, the grudge-match showdown between Paula Patton and Lea Seydoux, the sandstorm, Simon Pegg’s bellboy outfit, the declining battery life on Cruise’s magnetic gloves.
No, the best part of Ghost Protocol is the moment right before Cruise’s climb begins. He walks to an open window on what looks like the 237th floor, and the camera slowly rises above him—and over him, moving outside of the building.
2. Rogue Nation
The latest Mission wastes no time getting to its Big Showcase Scene: Cruise is dangling off the side of that airplane before the opening credits roll. That’s just the first surprise in Rogue Nation, a minor-key blockbuster built on throwback pleasures. McQuarrie’s real setpiece comes later, in an elaborate opera sequence (with a sniper or three) that feels positively Hitchcockian in its crosscutting complexity.
3. Mission: Impossible
The first film in this action franchise isn’t really an action movie at all. Sure, there are explosions, and gunshots, and a helicopter-versus-train climax that hasn’t aged well. But the first film feels more like an old-fashioned thriller. The best scenes are the quiet parts: The single bead of sweat falling off
Cruise’s glasses, or the mesmerizing everything-you-thought-you-knew-is-a-lie sitdown with Kittridge. Just two guys talking in a restaurant, but De Palma films it like a gladiator duel:
It’s easy to forget just how clever and unusual this first film is. De Palma always loved the Psycho fakeout: The Act I twist where you learn that the movie you’re watching isn’t the movie you thought it was. So the first Mission introduces Ethan Hunt alongside a team of familiar faces — Emilio Esteves, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Jon Voight — and proceeds to kill them all off, suddenly and unexpectedly.
4. M:I 2
Bigger and dumber, and bigger and dumber. This is the movie where Cruise indulged himself as a martial-arts maven and a fanboy for Hong Kong cinema, hiring expatriate John Woo and letting him film a spy movie like a glossy gunshot soap opera. M:I 2 arrived in 2000, which just means it’s the mountaintop peak for 90s Cruise: You can draw a line from the actor’s cocky Cole Trickle in Days of Thunder right to the beginning of the second Mission, where Ethan Hunt goes rock climbing 70 stories high. (His only supplies: A couple carabiners, and his perfect hair.)
5. M:I:3
The biggest bug with this movie is, for some people, its central feature.
Always a keen observer of upcoming talent, Cruise plucked J.J. Abrams from small-screen cult glory and gave him his first shot at a megabudget feature film. So the third Mission is recognizable as a spiritual sibling to Alias: A spy thriller that treats the central agent as a kind of superhero, alternating between their Normal Life and the Spy World.
Abrams loves to make things personal — he would later kill Kirk’s father and Spock’s mother in the same movie — and so the third film is the one that tries hardest to dimensionalize Ethan Hunt.
He’s retired and happily engaged; he only comes back to work for a this-time-it’s-personal rescue mission.
(Abrams initially pitched Alias with the question “What if Felicity were a spy?” and so it’s appropriate that, in his first movie, Felicity actually is a spy.)
What's your Favorite one?
