I have a hard time “turning my brain off” at the movies. That sounds like a humble brag (“I’m just too smart for my own good!”), but I actually consider it to be a failing. I envy those who can escape, who can more easily switch off their deepest critical facilities for two hours and fully surrender themselves over to a narrative experience.

Instead, I’m usually only half absorbed by the plot and the characters—and half concerned with the aesthetics and the behind-the-scenes magic: How did they do it? Why did they do it that way? This is a curse of being an artist, at least for me: you’re hyper-aware that this is all smoke and mirrors. It is a rare experience for me to be wholly transported.

For instance, this lack of acquiescence is one of the reasons I don’t really fuck with the MCU. It is basically impossible for me to watch a Marvel movie without constantly thinking to myself “this scene set in New York City was definitely filmed in Atlanta,” or “the two actors having a conversation in this scene have probably never met,” or “Jack Kirby created all of this and died penniless.” The seams are too nakedly transparent.

The Mission: Impossible series, however, is one of the few franchises where I’m able to flip my internal switch from critical to casual with ease. I’m not sure why. I don’t love the spy genre. I’ve yet to read John le Carré (a copy of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has sat on my bookshelf unread for years now). I don’t like James Bond (the Daniel Craig Casino Royale being a notable exception). And, while I enjoy Tom Cruise as a Movie Star™, he has never been reason alone enough for me to buy a ticket.

Maybe it’s the filmmaking team’s analog approach in our era of endless CGI sludge. Maybe it’s the balance they’ve struck between not too serious, not too dumb. Whatever it is, I’ve enjoyed this series immensely, and I’ve been anticipating the last entry (The Final Reckoning) for a while. I finally made it to the theatre last night (IMAX, baby!) to see it.

To celebrate, here is my wildly chaotic ranking of the whole Mission franchise.

Mission: Impossible: The Final Rank-oning

8. M:I:III

Is my dislike of J.J. Abrams partly born out of jealousy? Maybe. Did I find the universal rejection of The Rise of Skywalker immensely validating? Perhaps. Is it petty to put this last? I suppose. I have seen this movie three or four times and I remember next to nothing about it, other than Philip Seymour Hoffman being way overqualified as the villain and, of course, the asinine Rabbit’s Foot mystery box (which, like Rian Johnson before him, McQuarrie is forced to retcon). Overall: it’s fine.

7. Dead Reckoning

Christopher McQuarrie, director of the last four Mission’s, has embraced the practice of radical transparency in interviews and marathon three-hour podcasting sessions over the years, detailing how he and Tom Cruise essentially start each movie with an idea for a big action set piece and reverse engineer the plot from there, often writing new scenes the night before or radically changing things in the edit (in its most extreme: one of the opening sequences in The Final Reckoning was shot two days before they locked picture). This making-it-up-as-we-go formula worked, somehow, magically, with Rogue Nation and Fallout. In Dead Reckoning, the train starts to derail.

I’ve only seen this one once. My main memory—outside of the unexpectedly zany Lupin III car chase riff—was that it was an overly plotty mess. “Tom Cruise battles AI” seems like a premise designed in a lab especially for me, and it should be a lot of campy fun, but instead it inspires the series’s worst villain in Esai Morales’s Gabriel (no shade to the actor, he’s given nothing to work with). Also, this is the one where my favorite character is unceremoniously killed off, and I’m holding that against it. More about her later.

6. The Final Reckoning

The opening hour is kind of interminable? Jeff Zhang, one of my favorite film critics, put it well in his Letterboxd review:

The last thing I expected from a Mission: Impossible movie was franchise-brained, “remember this” grandstanding. My critical consciousness knew that its first hour—a key-jingling clipshow designed to haphazardly connect the mythology of eight films—was feckless in its pandering. But here’s the rub: I didn’t really care.

This one drops all pretense of caring about things like “character development” or “plot coherence,” jettisoning those elements to instead fully embrace the histrionics of “only Tom Cruise can save humanity” which the movie treats as deadly serious, as opposed to how it should be treated—which is as inherently silly.

However: the two big action sequences—the biplane chase finale and the submarine MacGuffin hunt midway thru—are some of the best in the entire series. There is also a weirdly beautiful upside down shot of Tom Cruise floating unconscious underneath a sheet of ice in the fetal position that legitimately recalled for me the Star Child at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

5. Mission: Impossible

I am not a fan of Brian DePalma. I find him wildly overrated. The fact that he is championed by Quentin Tarantino doesn’t help. It made next to no impression on me when I saw it for the first time—which was certainly on VHS, rented from Blockbuster. It is a thoroughly competent piece of popcorn entertainment that I like, but don’t love.

4. M:I—2

I have to be true to myself. When I saw this in the summer of 2000, I walked out of the movie theatre fist-pumping the air with delight. It is undeniably stupid, sure. But so what? I’m a soft touch for the operatic John Woo of it all 🕊️🕊️🕊️. The final showdown—which ends with Cruise kicking his gun out of the sand and catching it in mid-air—is iconic.

3. Fallout

I’m getting pretty tired of typing. Let me just reload my arms…

Okay, that’s better. This one has the best spy stuff. The best movie-as-rollercoaster-ride experience. And the best ending. It’s a crackerjack thrill ride pretty much from beginning to end. There’s not much else to say that’s elucidating or insightful: it is a Very Good Action Movie.

2. Ghost Protocol

The one I’ve seen the most. Probably because it is eminently watchable! Brad Bird embraces the goofiness of the 60s TV show with aplomb (the hallway projection scene in the Kremlin is great). The Burj Khalifa is probably still my favorite “Tom Cruise risks his life for the movies” stunt of the whole series (although the biplane chase in The Final Reckoning comes close.)

1. Rogue Nation

Need I say more?

Okay, I’ll say a little more. Ilsa Faust, the assassin-secret agent introduced in Rogue Nation and played by Rebecca Ferguson, is the best character in Mission: Impossible. If there were any justice in the world, we’d have already had a spinoff by now. Narratively, she needs to function as an equal to Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character—as an actress, Ferguson was basically an unknown at the time: yet she more than holds her own. It was exciting to watch in theatres and think to myself “this person is going to become a movie star”—and equally exciting years later to realize that Denis Villeneuve probably had the exact same reaction when he was watching it.

Moreover, I just love the vibe in this one. The stakes haven’t reached the over-the-top apocalyptic doomsday of the Reckoning duology, the spy stuff is well balanced with the action, and its a little darker than all the others. This one also has my favorite set piece of the entire franchise—which is not a stunt but the Hitchcockian opera house sequence. Just great movie stuff.

What’s your ranking? What’d you think of Final Reckoning? Let me know!

Leave a comment