The Austin Chronicle Guide to the Mission: Impossible Movies

Dun-dun-duh-dun, dun-dun-DUH-dun! Oh, Lalo Schifrin, you fiend, creating one of the all-time great TV themes - a theme so great that when Paramount Pictures revamped classic '60s spy thriller Mission: Impossible for the big screen, they wisely kept that instantly recognizable sting.

The 1996 original was Tom Cruise putting his dramatic actor career on hold for a minute and embracing the action hero persona that he'd avoided since Top Gun a decade earlier. Now, 27 years and seven movies later, Cruise is M:I and M:I is Tom Cruise, in all their globe-trotting, logic-defying, life-risking insanity. Every entry in the series has proved crazier than the last, most especially in whatever major stunt Cruise decides to undertake (making everyone wonder how these films get insurance or completion bonds).

With the seventh film, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, in cinemas now, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to look back at all our original reviews.

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Mission: Impossible (1996)

Directed by Brian de Palma. Starring Tom Cruise, Jon Voight, Emmanuelle Beart, Vanessa Redgrave, Henry Czerny, Ving Rhames, Jean Reno, Emilio Estevez.

What happens? The whole idea of the TV series - that it's all about a team of experts that change from week to week to outwit a coterie of villains – is vaporized as the original team is revealed and assassinated, and the series becomes about Ethan Hunt, played by Tom Cruise.

What's the global threat? The eradication of all IMF agents after someone gets hold of the CIA NOC list.

Tom's Big Stunt: Hunt's wire fu raid on a mainframe at CIA headquarters in Langley, which was half action sequence and half Loony Tunes comedy sequence in its ridiculous tension.

What we said: "Mission: Impossible doesn't make much of an impression because, on the big screen, its narrative improbabilities, which may have been palatable on the small screen years ago, seem magnified.... It's a mission gone awry, prompting you to hope that reruns of its television incarnation will pop up on cable soon." - Steve Davis

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Mission: Impossible Two (2000)

Directed by John Woo. Starring Tom Cruise, Dougray Scott, Thandie Newton, John Polson, Anthony Hopkins, Ving Rhames.

What happens? Limp Bizkit, yo! There's something so incredibly turn-of-the-millennium about having legendary Hong Kong action director John Woo's over-the-top visual romanticism and trademark slo-mo gliding over a Nu Metal soundtrack. Plus this is the movie that ran so over schedule that Dougray Scott (playing a rogue IMF agent) had to drop out of playing Wolverine in X-Men, allowing some Australian song-and-dance guy a chance to play everyone's favorite deadly Canadian.

What's the global threat? A bioweapon, the Chimera virus, which destroys all your red blood cells after 20 hours.

Tom's Big Stunt: The trailer was basically just the opening scene – Ethan free-climbing up a mesa in Moab, Utah. Carved into audience's brains, it overshadows what was supposed to be the grand finale of Cruise and Scott jousting across the desert on motorbikes.

What we said: "Your opinion on this John Woo-helmed sequel is going to depend on whichever camp you found yourself in following the 1996 original, which legendarily divided audiences straight down the middle. ... As pure a summer popcorn overdose as you're likely to find, M:i-2 is breezy, breathless, brainless fun, falling just short of Woo's own Face/Off but head and shoulders above anything else out there just now." – Marc Savlov

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Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Directed by J.J. Abrams. Starring Tom Cruise, Michelle Monaghan, Keri Russell, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Simon Pegg, Laurence Fishburne, Billy Crudup, Bahar Soomekh.

What happens? Philip Seymour Hoffman happens. International arms dealer and purveyor of carnage Owen Davian ends up being the only villain in the history of the franchise that's allowed to overshadow Ethan Hunt, just as Hoffman overshadows Cruise. You'll never look at their shared scene in Magnolia the same way again ...

What's the global threat? Rabbits foot, a mysterious bioweapon that ... well, it's never made clear because J.J. Abrams and his mystery box.

Tom's Big Stunt: Hanging on for dear life as he is edged off the screen by Hoffman.

What we said: "Unlike its predecessors, M:i:III occasionally stops to catch its breath – hence the fascination with and fascinating depiction of Ethan Hunt's home life (who even surmised he might have one?) – and these smallish downtimes serve to ratchet up the surrounding fireballs all the more. ... It's all poppycock, of course, but it's done with such vim and vigor and both narrative and visual flair that you care not a jot. Summer has arrived." – Marc Savlov

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Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)

Directed by Brad Bird. Starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton, Michel Nyqvist, Vladimir Mashkov, Josh Holloway, Anil Kapoor, Léa Seydoux.

What happens? Something something nuclear holocaust something something. With the equation locked in (Cruise does the action hijinks while the team plays backup), the fourth episode in the franchise keyed back into some of the Cold War paranoia that had melted in American cinema with Glasnost. Thank goodness that agency leadership assigned Jeremy Renner as the laconic agent Brandt (who at one point was being set up to take over the franchise).

What's the global threat? Stolen nuclear Russian nuclear codes that will be used to trigger global nuclear war. Which seems like a terrible plan.

Tom's Big Stunt: Climbing a mesa? Pfft. Anyone can do that. Climbing the 160-story Burj Khalifa in Dubhai? Call Ethan Hunt.

What we said: "Perhaps it’s the fact that I just finished reading Jaron Lanier's counterintuitive but deeply persuasive polemic You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, or maybe I'm just suffering from sequelitis, but my reaction to Ethan Hunt's fourth impossible mission on the big screen (really big; this one's shot in IMAX format) was one long existential yawn." – Marc Savlov

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Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Starring Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Ferguson, Ving Rhames, Alec Baldwin, Sean Harris.

What happens? With the IMF disbanded, Hunt goes on a global chase to get their funding back.

What's the global threat? The Syndicate, a freelance agency of rogue agents because every agent in these films is either a traitor or wrongly suspected of being a traitor. If you're disappointed by that, at least there's some nerve gas at the beginning.

Tom's Big Stunt: Ethan hanging off the side of an Airbus A400M as it takes off and only getting inside at 5,000 feet.

What we said: "McQuarrie infuses the story with some existential weariness on the part of Cruise’s character, but not too much (this is an action film after all, not a John Le Carré novel). And while some of those action sequences feel a bit well-worn (Chases with motorcycles! A facility inadvertently designed for stealth infiltration!), there are wonderfully choreographed scenes." – Josh Kupecki

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Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Starring Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Ving Rhames, Sean Harris.

What happens? The revolving door of directors quits revolving as McQuarrie sticks around and ensures that Cruise is in and Renner's out (don't weep too much: he was off saving the universe from Thanos in Avengers: Endgame and passed on the chance of a cameo in which he was supposed to die anyway). However, the film gets two big additions: Henry Cavill and his amazing appearing pocket, arguably the most gifable moment of the entire franchise.

What's the global threat? Nukes again, this time with Ethan on the hunt for three warheads in the hands of what's left of the Syndicate, now redubbed the Apostles.

Tom's Big Stunt: Ethan Hunt jumping out of an airplane to perform a HALO (High Altitude Low Open) skydive jump.

What we said: "There are set-pieces in this film, especially the last 30 minutes, that set the bar for big-budget, rich-people-entertaining-you-with-their-own-stunts spectacle. Add to that the fact that no one in the film menacingly asked “Where’s the disk?” and you have a winner here." – Josh Kupecki

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Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Henry Czerny, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Cary Elwes, Shea Whigham.

What happens? A hunt for a key that's the McGuffin to unlock the inevitable part two.

What's the global threat? An out-of-control AI. Timely.

Tom's Big Stunt: Never happy unless he's throwing himself off something, this time it's his motorbike-assisted BASE jump off a cliff, leaving six busted bikes scattered over Norway.

What we said: "Even at 163 minutes, there’s so much crammed in that threatens to make Dead Reckoning Part One feel at once overstuffed and overfamiliar. So it’s a credit to the film that, even as the third- or fourth-best of the series, it’s such an exceptional piece of entertainment, one to serve as a reminder that we can and should expect more from our ultra expensive tentpole franchises. This is Mission: Impossible as you know it, but also as you’ve come to love it. Cruise and McQuarrie play the hits like you’re hearing them for the first time." – Trace Sauveur