Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025)

The final episode goes to a lot of trouble to tie in characters and storylines from across the previous I-don't-know-how-many movies, and the result is an exhausting first hour of bombast, but once these operatics are out of the way, the action starts - also exhausting (impossible missions, truly, in sunken submarines in subzero temperatures, and high-speed dogfights and plane-hopping at high altitudes) but exhausting in exactly the way fans of the Mission: Impossible movies want.

★★★★☆

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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

These Mission Impossible movies have steadily become more bombastic with agents like Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt - old now, his old experienced eyes staring out from under a peculiarly manicured lawn of hair and through impossibly youthful skin - now uttering lines like, "We live and die in the shadows, for those we hold close--and those we never meet" - eye roll - but the set-pieces showcasing 'those' stunts and offering visions of near-future tech, plus an entertaining sequence on the Oreint Express and a pretty good snarling, gnashing new villain played by Pom Klementieff, are enough to keep you watching, just not with as much excitement as when you watched episodes 1, 4, 5 and 6.

★★★☆☆

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Mission: Impossible Fallout (2018)

About the only area that could be improved is the likeability of the central characters but otherwise action doesn't get much better than this two-and-a-half-hour string of foot, motorbike, car and helicopter chases filmed so spectacularly every microfacial expression on Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt's face is crystal clear as he careens cars through city streets, dogfights over Kashmir, sprints glamorous European city blocks at roof level and, as is known very well right from the start, saves the world from the dastardly plot of a bamboozling number of counter- and counter-counter-spies in what is essentially the same plot as Rogue Nation.

★★★★☆

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Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)

Years after its release in 2013, this M:I entry - the better-than-usual fourth in the series - happened to come on TV while I was sitting with the person I'd gone to see it with in the cinema, and neither of us could recall a single plot detail - only that Simon Pegg returns as Benji, that seemingly constipated comic-relief tech guy who bungles every part of the mission (Ethan, does Benji need to be trained up before going into the field?), that Ethan Hunt suction-cups up a Dubai skyscraper, races through a sandstorm, and that there is a stunt in a hotel involving diamonds and Mission: Impossible's clunkiest spy tool yet - a fake arm on a white man in a Chinese waiter uniform (guess who) - which all just goes to show how little bearing plot has on how enjoyable an M:I episode is.

★★★★☆

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M:i:III (2006)

Number 3 is a return to form after the lamentable John Woo-directed second in the M:I series, and although it is slightly histrionic, Mission: Impossible 3 benefits from a chilling turn by Philip Seymour Hoffman as a sociopathic villain and is also aided by a threadbare plot centred around a McGuffin that allows action and spy thrills to come to the fore.

★★★☆☆

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Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)

The worst line in this, the most incessant and most implausible M:I movie yet, is, "Ethan Hunt is the epitomy of destiny," (thanks, Alec Baldwin, the new secretary of the IMF), a line as overwrought as the whole of this fifth outing that goes on and on, never letting up, with the most bombastic and ridiculous set-pieces ever, making me wonder if it is me that is too old for this, not Cruise. 

★★★☆☆

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M:i-2 (2010)

Tom Cruise is the best thing in this, the worst of the five Mission: Impossible movies so far and one that plays like an Australian tourism advertisement marketed to an Asian movie-going audience, with pointed Australian accents and Aussie tourism icons placed throughout and with direction by John Woo despite his balletic "heroic bloodshed" style not being suited to the spy series.

★☆☆☆☆

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Mission: Impossible (1996)

Heralding a Hollywood trend that continues today (that of television series being reinvented as mega movies) Brian de Palma's Mission: Impossible made a big impact with its big name stars - Tom Cruise, Kirstin Scott Thomas, Jon Voight - and with its tv-style credit opening, with its thrilling plot and set pieces on a scale far bigger than its tv namesake, and it paved the way for three lesser sequels and a slew of similarly big budget 80s-tv inspired blockbusters (Charlies Angels, A Team, Lost In Space, Miami Vice...)

★★★★☆

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