In advance of watching the final* Mission: Impossible movie in the theatre – Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning – I thought I would rewatch the seven previous instalments.
It had been a while since I had seen them, and I didn’t think I could fully appreciate the inevitable callbacks in Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning unless the others were fresh in my mind.
Another reason is that the previous movies had fragmented in my head like a Windows ’95 PC, so I couldn’t remember what happened in each one.
For instance, I could remember Ethan Hunt jumping off the Burj Khalifa at one point, and clinging to the side of a plane, and spinning around in some underwater roulette wheel thing, but I’ll be damned if I could remember which movie they were from, let alone what was at stake. He was probably retrieving a McGuffin, let’s be honest.
The revolving door cast didn’t help, either. How many was Jeremy Renner in? Didn’t Ethan’s wife come back at some point? When did Rebecca Ferguson wear a bikini?
To resolve this, I watched them all again and have produced the following handy guide to the Mission: Impossible movies.
*Final movie, my ass. They’re going to make him do this until he’s ninety. Which…isn’t that far away.
Mission: Impossible (1996)
I hadn’t seen this one since it opened in 1996. I didn’t particularly rate it then, but it’s generally well regarded, so my hopes were high of a re-evaluation.
The pros: I liked the shock factor of Ethan’s team being killed off early. It looks and feels like a Cold War spy flick. The infiltration scene is iconic, if a little overrated. The cast is top notch.
The cons: a romantic subplot seems to have been awkwardly cut, and I feel it would have added to the movie. My main issue is that the villain’s actions were confusing.
Why did John Voight reveal himself to be alive to Ethan when he did? Why did he shoot his own hot wife dead but leave Ethan alive? Why leave a moving train and try to board a moving helicopter? That’s asking for trouble. Just wait for the next stop.
Handy reminder:
McGuffin: the CIA’s NOC (non-official cover) list that reveals agents’ true identities.
IMF boss: Henry Czerny.
Early deaths: er… pretty much everyone.
Hot female team members: Emmanuelle Béart, Kristin Scott Thomas, Ingeborga Dapkunaite.
Male team members: Emilio Estevez, Ving Rhames (1), Jean Reno.
Big stunt: infiltrating the CIA – plummeting on a wire and stopping inches from the ground. Done for real multiple times (Tom kept messing it up and banging his nose on the ground).
Big bad: John Voight, Vanessa Redgrave.
Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)
Or M:I-2, as it awkwardly appears on the poster.
This John Woo directed redheaded stepchild of Mission Impossible movies was way better than I remembered. It feels out of place in the series but works well as a standalone action flick.
It’s overly stylised. Everyone wears Oakley sunglasses, leather coats, knows Kung Fu and rides motorbikes. It’s like if Michael Bay made The Matrix. It has a kickass rock soundtrack, but it dates the movie somewhat.
I didn’t remember a frame of this movie outside of Tom Cruise rock climbing at the start. I didn’t even remember Thandiwe Newton, and she’s absolutely gorgeous in this.
The infiltration scene is underwhelming. Some of the action is over-the-top, such as Ethan pulling 180-degree handbrake turns on a motorbike while firing a gun, but mostly it’s legit.
Plus, it’s the only MI movie where Ethan isn’t disavowed as some point. That’s got to be worth something, right?
Handy reminder:
McGuffin: a genetically modified disease called Chimera (and the antidote).
IMF boss: Anthony Hopkins.
Early deaths: er… Rade Serbedzija.
Hot female team members: Thandiwe Newton.
Male team members: Ving Rhames (2), John Polson.
Big stunts: the knife close to the eye (done entirely in camera) and the free climb at Dead Horse Point, Utah.
Big bad: Dougray Scott.
Mission: Impossible III (2006)
Or M:I:III, as it awkwardly appears on the poster. It’s practically braille.
The JJ Abrams one. Ethan’s in love and out of the game before getting pulled back in. Ethan is humanised by his relationship with Julia (Michelle Monaghan), and you know it’s going to be used against him at some point.
The Vatican infiltration is well executed, but JJ cheats in a second infiltration scene by cutting to the escape. The final showdown is relatively low key. Philip Seymour Hoffman is great, but the second half of the movie can’t quite match the first.
Handy reminder:
McGuffin: the Rabbit’s Foot (we don’t find out what it is until Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning, or should that be Mission Impossible: Final Retconning?).
IMF boss: Laurence Fishburne.
Early deaths: Keri Russell.
Hot female team members: Michelle Monaghan (1), Maggie Q.
Male team members: Ving Rhames (3), Simon Pegg (1) Jonathan Rhys-Meyers.
Big stunt: swinging between skyscrapers in Shanghai. Too many edits dull its impact because Tom did it for real. Future movies had the good sense to just point the camera at the stupid thing Tom was doing now.
Big bad: Philip Seymour Hoffman/Billy Crudup.
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)
Here’s where they ditched the sequential numbering system and made things even more confusing. The way I recall the order of the next 3 films is to remember that each title contains fewer letters than the previous one, in reverse prime number order: Ghost Protocol (13), Rogue Nation (11), Fallout (7). Simple as that.
This time the entire IMF is disavowed, but they press on anyway to track down a bad guy who wants to shoot Russian nukes at San Francisco… not sure who I should be rooting for here.
Directed by Brad Bird, this is where the series really kicks into gear. I think of these movies as a string of twinkly lights held together by a thin wire. The lights are the various exotic locations that the movie travels to – here it is Budapset to Moscow to Dubai to Mumbai – and the thin wire is the plot. It just about holds it all together, but don’t pull on the wire too much or it might break.
Killing off Josh Holloway early, fresh off Lost, sets the stakes. The Burj Khalifa stunt induces anxiety. Jeremey Renner is a good addition to the cast and Paula Patton picks up the slack on the hottie front. Also, Simon Pegg has lost weight. Good for him.
Handy checklist:
McGuffin: Russian nuclear launch codes.
IMF boss: Tom Wilkinson (uncredited).
Early deaths: Josh Holloway.
Hot female team members: Paula Patton, Michelle Monaghan (2). She doesn’t take part in the mission but cameos in the epilogue.
Male team members: Simon Pegg (2), Jeremy Renner (1), Ving Rhames (4). Ving doesn’t take part in the mission but appears in the epilogue to keep his streak active.
Big stunt: Tom scales the outside of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
Big bad: Michael Nyqvist.
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)
The first Christopher McQuarrie effort (he directs all of them from now on).
He sticks to the established template, except with EVEN BIGGER STUNTS! We travel from Minsk to London to Vienna to Casablanca to Oxford to London again as Ethan and company hunt The Syndicate, an upside-down version of IMF that likes to cause terrorism rather than prevent it.
Great action sequences, including the fight at the opera and the motorbike chase with ZERO 180-degree handbrake turns while shooting at bad guys. For shame.
Caught up in the mix is Rebecca Ferguson’s disavowed MI6 agent. She’s both an ally and an antagonist to Ethan but ends up on the right side. When she asks Ethan to run away with her at the end and he refuses, I wanted to slap him through the screen.
Handy checklist:
McGuffin: a virtual red box (on a USB stick) with access to £2.4billion in offshore accounts.
IMF boss: Alec Baldwin (1).
Early deaths: for the first time…nobody!
Hot female team members: Rebecca Ferguson (1). This is the bikini movie.
Male team members: Simon Pegg (3), Jeremy Renner (2), Ving Rhames (5).
Big stunt: Tom hanging off the side of an A400 plane as it takes off, for real. No cuts.
Big bad: Sean Harris (1), who has a creepy voice. Watch Possum if you want to be weirded out.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)
The one with Tom Cruise’s broken ankle and Henry Cavill’s magnificent moustache. In fact, pretty much everything about this one is magnificent. Not many movie series can claim that the sixth one is the best, but this one can.
Most Mission: Impossible movies are standalone entries, but this is a proper sequel, with several callbacks to the earlier entries:
- Vanessa Kirby plays the daughter of Max, the arms dealer from the original movie.
- Ethan rock climbs for the first time since M:I-2.
- Michelle Monaghan returns as Ethan’s ex-wife Julia for the first time since M:I:III (aside from her brief cameo in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol).
- It acts as a direct sequel to Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, with The Syndicate, Rebecca Ferguson, Alec Baldwin and Sean Harris returning from that movie.
It feels like this was planned as the last one, because it wraps up Ethan and Julia’s story and hints at a future for Ethan and Ilsa (Rebeca Ferguson). Obviously that didn’t happen, but it could have ended here and we’d all be happy.
Handy checklist:
McGuffin: a suitcase containing three plutonium cores.
IMF boss: Alec Baldwin (2) – a slimmed down version (I mean he lost weight, not that his role was reduced). The first IMF director to appear in more than one movie.
Early deaths: nobody! Ethan shoots Luthor (Ving Rhames) but it’s okay, he’s got a bulletproof vest.
Hot female team members: Rebecca Ferguson (2). No bikinis this time – she was pregnant during shooting. Michelle Monaghan (3). Sort of – she’s not an agent but she assists, and she’s a hottie.
Male team members: Simon Pegg (4), Ving Rhames (6).
Big stunt: take your pick from this lot: The HALO jump, the motorbike chase through Paris, Tom hanging off a helicopter, Tom falling off a helicopter, Tom flying a helicopter, Tom jumping from one building to another (where he broke his ankle but still walked away. The shot is in the film).
Big bad: Henry Cavill, Sean Harris (2) – the first returning villain.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (2023)
Part One (of one). In a few years this will be a documentary, as rogue AI bot The Entity trolls the entire human race. It’s not entirely clear what it’s going to do, but it will be bad – crashing financial markets, starting WW3, creating naked AI images of your mum.
The key to controlling The Entity lies in a…key. Literally. Every country is looking for it because whoever claims it can unlock…something…and be Master of the Universe. Wasn’t this the plot of Ready Player One?
Ethan goes rogue (no, really?) because he doesn’t want anyone to have that much power. It’s a tactical error because he then spends nearly three hours of runtime being pursued by CIA agents. He could have agreed to go along with the CIA plan then betrayed them later.
This is another superb instalment with amazing action set pieces, tension and drama. Minor quibbles include multi-person exposition dumps where each person says one sentence each (can they read each other’s minds?) and the fact that the bad guy appears to be working for The Entity. Why? How? Was he groomed online? I’m sure they’ll explain it in Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning.
Handy checklist:
McGuffin: a cruciform key that splits into two parts and can be used to turn off The Entity.
IMF boss: nobody. Baldwin bought the farm in Fallout. Kittridge returns from the original movie but this time he’s Director of the CIA, there is no IMF boss. The position is cursed, to be fair. It’s like teaching Defence Against The Dark Arts.
Early deaths: Rebecca Ferguson, but it’s okay – she faked it.
Hot female team members: Rebecca Ferguson (3) and the goddess that is Hayley Atwell (1).
Male team members: Simon Pegg (4), Ving Rhames (7).
Big stunt: Tom driving off a mountain on a motorbike.
Big bad: Esai Morales, The Entity.
One more thing. I would like to take a moment to appreciate the genius of Ving Rhames. The guy lucked into a franchise thirty years ago and is still riding the wave with minimum effort. He sits on a laptop while Tom jumps into volcanoes or whatever. In Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning he checks out of the movie halfway through because he needs to work from home.
This is not a criticism. He gets away with it because he exudes such gravitas. He’s Ethan’s anchor, his moral compass, and when he speaks, everyone listens. I wish he had more development as a character, but he does so much with the little he’s given. He is my MI MVP.
