Every Mission Impossible movie ranked from worst to best

The seventh Mission Impossible movie, Dead Reckoning, had the unfortunate timing of being released exactly one week before Barbenheimer completely took over pop culture.

Even Tom Cruise running for his life couldn’t break out of the dominance of the candy-coloured world of Barbie and Ken or the grim nihilism and thundering score of Oppenheimer’s nuclear warfare.

The film underperformed which probably explains why the follow-up, the eighth and final movie in the 28-years-and-still-going franchise has been renamed from Dead Reckoning Part Two to Final Reckoning. Nobody wants to go see part two if they didn’t catch part one.

Dead Reckoning was a great movie, full of the same crazy practical stunts and high stakes the Mission Impossible movies have come to be known for, it was just super bad timing.

With the release of the eighth movie slated for May 2025 and the first teaser trailer dropping today (yes, Cruise bolts in what looks to be at least two different scenes), now’s the time to take stock of the existing seven and rank them in order.

To be completely fair, for spectacle and jaw-dropping stunts, Mission Impossible delivers, and you know they’re doing it for real in the field, not on some gimble in front of a green screen, so even the lesser ones are still better than its imitators.

You have six months to rewatch them all before Ethan Hunt’s dangerous missions end.

7. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 2 (2000)

There was certainly a style to John Woo’s takeover, thrusting it into the flashy world of Woo’s Hong Kong action movies. But the story around bio-geneticists developing a virus (and its antidote) went off the rails.

The Sydney setting was a local boon but the second movie lacked the pizazz and wow factor of the franchise’s other entries. It doesn’t have a memorable signature stunt piece and it wasn’t as taut as its predecessor. Without any real emotional resonance and some patchy performances, it’s the only proper dud of the series.

6. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE III (2006)

Following his success on TV with shows including Lost and Alias, J.J. Abrams was brought in to revive the franchise, picking up the story of Ethan Hunt some years down the track and introducing an added complication: a fiancé, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who doesn’t know his true vocation.

When Ethan’s former protégé Lindsay (Abrams collaborator Keri Russell) is killed, he’s pulled into a plot involving an arms dealer (Philip Seymour Hoffman). There’s that bonkers infiltration into the Vatican and scaling and jumping out of buildings in Shanghai but the final confrontation is a tad anticlimactic. Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Maggie Q have single-entry appearances.

5. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: DEAD RECKONING (2023)

There are some proper “whoa” moments in Dead Reckoning including the chase through the moody streets of Venice, ending in that death, and the wild train sequence in which Cruise and Hayley Atwell travel through several cars vertically.

While the plot of trying to control or destroy a rogue, sentient AI known as the Entity is convoluted and takes several turns as players reveal their role in the conspiracy, Dead Reckoning really cements the increasing emotional foundation of the series — Ethan Hunt really loves his team.

4. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL (2011)

Directed by animation filmmaker Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille), Ghost Protocol does have a zippier and more jubilant energy than the rest of the franchise. Here, the story kicks off with nuclear launch codes, the Russians and a mysterious buyer.

What Ghost Protocol is really remembered for are the non-stop elaborate sequences including one in which Ethan narrowly escapes a bomb in the Kremlin, another in which he climbs the outside of the Burj Khalifa (WILD) and then the ensuing sandstorm that engulfs the getaway chase, capped off with that nail-biting carpark spectacle.

3. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: FALLOUT (2018)

Fallout is remembered for a few things but one of its defining traits is Henry Cavill’s Terminator-esque agent punching everything in sight.

He, Cruise and Liang Yang engage in a brutal three-way fisticuffs in a toilet, there’s an actual HALO jump onto Paris’s Grand Palais (or a replica of it), and that visceral helicopter fight. Take that in for a moment, a staged battle between two helicopters.

The icing on the cake was the callback by bringing Julia into the story, lending emotional stakes to Ethan’s other mission: protecting the people he loves.

2. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: ROGUE NATION (2015)

In the world of espionage, there always seems to be a shadow government that has been moving all the pieces. In Mission Impossible, it’s The Syndicate, a secret cabal made up of rogue agents from all over the world and led by MI6 operative Soloman Lane (Sean Harris). Lane is a formidable opponent and he seems able to penetrate Ethan’s psyche more than his previous foes.

There’s the sequence through the Tower of London, the cavernous underground stand-off and the Vienna Opera shenanigans, but the piece de resistance has to be the “liberation” of a digital ledger from an underwater vault. Time and oxygen were literally running out.

1. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE (1996)

Where it all started, Mission Impossible adapted the 1966 TV show of the same name and turned into a paranoid spy thriller in the way that only Brian de Palma can, with a screenplay by David Koepp and Chinatown’s Robert Towne.

You knew it meant business when that first mission in Prague killed almost the entire team, and these weren’t usually expendable stars, we’re talking about Kristin Scott Thomas, Emilio Estevez and, seemingly, Jon Voight. No one was safe.

Incredibly well-paced, the film moves along at speed, throwing at you now-iconic stunts (the retrieval of the disc containing the identities of undercover agents from the CIA, the bead of sweat that threatened to blow everything) and double-crosses.

Mission Impossible became a different thing as it went on but that original film is still the most taut, focused and impressive of the lot.