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The Guardian
3 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Impossibly frustrating: why Mission: Impossible 8 was a major letdown
If the title is sincere, and this really is the final reckoning, then it's been a franchise of two halves. Mission: Impossible diehards tend to underrate the first half (which ran from Brian De Palma's brisk 1996 original to 2011's fun Ghost Protocol) as much as they overrate the second (which launched with 2015's Rogue Nation). Yet the rumbles and grumbles emanating from public screenings suggests a disgruntled consensus is forming around the concluding instalment: that this is an altogether disjointed way to resolve the affairs of Ethan Hunt and his IMF crew, and a shaky way to ignite the movie summer season. Ninety minutes in which nothing happens over and over again, followed by 70 minutes of M:I B-roll. To better diagnose this latest glitch in the Hollywood machine, we need to return to the relighting of the fuse. This was the franchise to which Tom Cruise retreated in the wake of the commercial underperformance of 1999's Eyes Wide Shut and Magnolia – the two most rigorous turns of this star's career, films in which Cruise allowed himself to be rattled and seen to be rattled, only to be met with widespread public and awards-circuit indifference. The Mission: Impossibles, by contrast, would be the sort of 4DX-coded sure thing for which audiences have routinely turned out, a creative safe space, even as the films' constituent set pieces pushed their prime mover into performing ever riskier business to ensure bums on seats. In those early films, the character of Hunt was as much martyr and marked man as saviour or secular saint, targeted at every turn by directors with comparably forceful visions. The sensationalist De Palma revelled in the set-up's potential for spectacle; and while, in retrospect, the motorbike-and-mullet combo of 2000's M:I 2, directed by John Woo and set to a bruising Limp Bizkit beat, was bound to date rapidly, the sometime animator Brad Bird, in Ghost Protocol, had the bright idea of turning the series into a live-action cartoon, with Cruise defying gravity and nature alike by hanging off the side of the Burj Khalifa and personally outrunning a sandstorm. The last four films, however, bear the imprint of screenwriter turned director Christopher McQuarrie, who concluded that what this series needed was a little more conversation, overseeing the construction of a vast story framework for his star to dangle off one-handed. That approach reaches its apotheosis in The Final Reckoning, but the scaffolding now overwhelms the spectacle. The attempt to solder eight films together ends in much-rewritten incoherence – see Ving Rhames's confused sendoff – and, worryingly, results in missions being described rather than shown. You wonder whether the insurers blanched after Cruise crocked an ankle shooting 2018's Fallout; now we're left with folks talking at length in nondescript rooms. Is this a Mission: Impossible movie, as advertised, or some M:I-themed podcast? The spectacle, when it tardily follows, is subpar; nothing rivals the train derailment in 2023's Dead Reckoning, which perversely benefitted from McQuarrie's yen for stringing matters out. A soggy deep dive, cramped and claustrophobic, offers another (this time depressurised) chamber piece; during a rote subterranean shootout, we learn world-ending AI generators can apparently be stored in complex cave systems. (I mean, how long's the extension cable?) The biplane conclusion feels more like the M:Is of yore, but chiefly reminds you of Top Gun: Maverick's superior engineering. Too often, McQuarrie has deferred to Cruise and his exhausted stunt coordinators; as a result, the series' bank of memorable images has dwindled. At this length, other flaws become apparent. While the cast expanded once the series set up shop in London, the supporting players now have far less to do, save raise sporadic eyebrows in Hunt's direction. McQuarrie has penned great intros for his women (Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Hayley Atwell), but they're then stranded because Cruise is neither Cary Grant nor Colin Farrell. (Onscreen chemistry remains his most impossible mission.) Making artificial intelligence (AI) the villain in 2025 is a resonant choice, but it's never developed beyond abstract concept; the human big bad (the ever-underused Esai Morales) is an afterthought. Late M:I is mostly All About Tom, or as the credits frame it: Tom Cruise in A Tom Cruise Production. Maybe the star still has enough goodwill in the tank to get the series over the line financially, but creatively, The Final Reckoning is a busted flush: the fact it's been outperformed on opening weekend by a live-action Lilo & Stitch seems in some way telling. For his part, Cruise has earned the right to stand alone and unbowed atop the BFI Imax like the world's most celebrated Antony Gormley figure; his stardom has only been reaffirmed over the course of the past quarter-century. But it's a problem when your publicity stunts generate punchier images than anything in the film you're promoting. That long-lit fuse flickered out before it reached the explosives; and in any event, the gelignite has been swapped for flannel and waffle.
CNET
3 days ago
- Business
- CNET
'Mission: Impossible: Final Reckoning' Is Out Now. Here's Where to Stream the First 7 Movies
It's been almost 30 years since Mission: Impossible hit cinemas in 1996 as an adaptation of the 1966 television series of the same name. The Brian De Palma-directed film, starring Tom Cruise, was a critical success and kickstarted a franchise so successful that MI movies are still coming out more than two decades later. When the first movie came out I was extremely excited to see it and borrowed the VHS tape from a neighbor. Flash forward to 2000 and I made it my mission to see the sequel, MI2, at the box office. After directors De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams and Brad Bird played hot potato with the reins, Christopher McQuarrie helmed the next four films, beginning with Rogue Nation. With Mission: Impossible -- The Final Reckoning coming out May 23, I'm binge-watching the whole series on a streaming service. If you're thinking about doing the same thing -- or at least rewatching the previous film -- here's where you can stream all of the Mission: Impossible movies for an adrenaline-fueled romp. How to watch Mission: Impossible parts 1-7 The entire Mission: Impossible series -- from the 1996 original to 2023's Dead Reckoning -- is available to stream on Paramount Plus, making it the most convenient streaming service to binge the franchise. Prime Video includes the first four films alongside the seventh in your subscription: Mission: Impossible, MI 2, MI III, Ghost Protocol and Dead Reckoning. The other two films require a rental or purchase fee. Hulu subscribers can stream the first five movies: Mission: Impossible, MI 2, MI III, Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation. Mission: Impossible -- The Final Reckoning hits theaters on May 23, in a year that will also see Paramount Pictures bring back two other franchises this summer, with Smurfs arriving in July and The Naked Gun coming in August. James Martin/CNET Paramount Plus Carries all Mission: Impossible movies Paramount Plus has a starting price of $8 per month or $60 per year for its basic, ad-supported plan. The Paramount Plus with Showtime tier goes for $13 a month or $120 per year. You can take advantage of a one-week free trial if you'd like to test the service out before committing. Alternatively, you can get Paramount Plus with a Walmart Plus subscription, which sets you back $13 per month or $98 per year. If you have Walmart Plus, you can upgrade from the entry-level Paramount Plus tier to Paramount Plus with Showtime for $5.50 per month or $65 annually. In addition to the MI movies, you can stream tons of other films and series on Paramount Plus, including Smile 2, Evil and Criminal Minds: Evolution. See at Paramount Plus Do you need to watch the entire Mission: Impossible series before The Final Reckoning? Generally, most of the Mission: Impossible movies are at least somewhat standalone, especially Mission: Impossible 2. While I recommend watching the whole lineup, I recognize that not everyone has time for a commitment like that. At the very least, whether it's been a while or you've never seen it, I recommend watching Dead Reckoning because The Final Reckoning is a direct sequel. The trailer for the new movie references Mission: Impossible, MI III, Ghost Protocol, Fallout and Dead Reckoning, so it's worth queuing those flicks up. MI 2 and Rogue Nation don't show up in the trailer, although that's not to say there's no continuity with them in The Final Reckoning.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ranking the Mission: Impossible Movies
With Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning hitting theaters everywhere, we've sorted and sifted through the previous M:I installments for a ranking of Ethan Hunt's high-octane IMF adventures. The Final Reckoning is said to conclude, story-wise, the awesome ride this film franchise has been on for the past 30 years, though that doesn't mean this will be the last Mission: Impossible movie as the title is, basically, "final" in name only. So let's explore this 30-year journey by listing the M:I movies from worst to best. Or, to put it a better way, least-great to greatest. Because they're all thrilling and fun in their own way. Previously, we ranked all of Ethan Hunt's IMF team members from each movie and the Mission: Impossible villains. Check those out when you're done here!7. Mission: Impossible 2 (2002) Mission: Impossible 2 was the most MTV-driven of all the M:I films, with tons of TV and nu-metal hype behind it. Yet it also continued the brief trend of these movies being sort of wild auteur-driven takes, shifting from the pulpy Hitchcockian Brian De Palma to Hong Kong action-poet John Woo. Thus, it stands as the most different of all the installments, and, ultimately the least satisfying. For this one outing, Ethan Hunt and the IMF team -- who we'd never see again aside from ol' reliable Luther (Ving Rhames) -- went full slo-mo action opera, complete with Woo's trademark doves, wild motorcycle stunts, and an overblown love triangle involving a thief named Nyah (Thandiwe Newton) and her connection to an ex-IMFer (Dougray Scott) looking to unleash a deadly plague. It was a "cool at the time" M:I movie that didn't age all that well once a different look and tone locked in place with M:I 3 six years later. Still, Anthony Hopkins playing Ethan's boss, just this once, was a nice addition and also we got our first taste of Tom Cruise doing a dangerous stunt -- the free solo rock-climbing up the side of Utah's Dead Horse Point. It wasn't as death-defying as his future escapades would be, since he had a harness and ropes (that were removed digitally in post) and a stunt double, but it sure looked cool to see him up there in the shots he himself performed, and it planted the seeds of more awesome stunts to come. 6. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (2023) After the highs of Mission: Impossible - Fallout, which was the culmination of the franchise steadily climbing in quality with each passing movie for a decade, Dead Reckoning (originally Dead Reckoning Part One) was a deflating step down. Yes, even with that spectacular motorcycle-off-the-cliff stunt. Firstly, Ethan Hunt and his team clashing with a rogue AI program felt out-of-step. Or, in the very least, a step too late as TV and movies had been doing AI stories for a long, long while before Ethan went toe-to-toe with "The Entity." Then there was the human villain (Esai Morales), who felt a bit toothless compared to past Big Bads, and whose ties to Ethan's past, which had never before been explored, felt a bit "Randy Meeks' Rules of the Horror Trilogy." Then throw in a controversial death and an ending action sequence that didn't thrill like the many M:I third-act crucibles before it, and you've got just a medium-good Impossible flick. Which is not what we need right when the entire run is wrapping things up. 5. Mission: Impossible (1996) The first Mission: Impossible movie was a blast, only really suffering here because better ones followed it down the line. Brian De Palma's strong visual eye and stylized flare for thrillers served this franchise opener well, as most of the story involves Ethan trying to clear his name and find the traitor who killed off his entire team, including his mentor Jim Phelps (Jon Voight playing the role Peter Graves made famous on the TV series). The "dangly" Langley Heist sequence was an instant hit, and was fodder for much pop culture parody at the time, and the TGY Bullet Train sequence at the end, even with mid-'90s CGI, still holds up amazingly well. The franchise would eventually find more of a traditional action movie tone, as bold set pieces, and Tom Cruise's running, would become more and more the focus, but the first M:I, which was also Cruise's first time as a producer, will always be a solid watch. Should you choose to accept it... 4. Mission: Impossible III (2006) J.J Abrams, who was coming from the TV world, wasn't exactly an audacious auteur pick like a Brian De Palma or John Woo, but Abrams was riding high on his series Alias, and Cruise, impressed by the show's clever, layered revival of the spy genre, chose his man. The result was Ethan Hunt getting a true love interest, and wife, in Michelle Monaghan's Julia, which in turn gave fans a chance to see Ethan become vulnerable in ways like never before. Unlike the romance in M:I 2, which came across as glossy and flimsy, this new relationship gave M:I 3 its foundation, and set the stage for Ethan's story going forward through the franchise. Throw in Ethan coming out of retirement to help a trainee (Keri Russell), a deliciously devilish turn by Philip Seymour Hoffman as the villain, a traitor in the midst, a fantastic Vatican (person) heist, the introduction of Simon Pegg as Benji, and a (literal) heart-stopping finish, and you get an emotionally deeper Mission: Impossible as well as the excellent M:I movie that carved a whole new path for the saga. 3. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) The final Mission: Impossible movie on the "rotating directors" train - before they'd all be directed by Tom Cruise's main collaborator, Christopher McQuarrie - was Ghost Protocol, a soaring high point for the franchise directed by Brad Bird, who was helming his first live-action movie after almost a decade at Pixar where he wrote and directed The Incredibles and Ratatouille. Ghost Protocol is a triumph, building off the M:I 3 template, presenting classic spy thrills in fresh ways, making time for laughs, and officially kicking off the era of "Tom Cruise does a stunt where he might actually die." Because who can ever forget the scaling of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. A true leveling up of the rock-climbing in M:I 2. Yes, it's the third time Ethan's disavowed by the IMF and labeled a traitor. But Ghost Protocol ramps up the danger, raises the stakes, gives Benji actual field work, has Tom Cruise running through a sandstorm, and caps it all off with an edge-of-your-seat fight in a 20-story car tower. And just when you think it may have pulled an Alien 3, it rewards those who were invested in Ethan and Julia in the previous movie. For many ImpossiFans, this is their favorite Ethan and Co. adventure. 2. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) By the time Rogue Nation rolled around - the fifth Mission: Impossible film - the franchise has found its true groove and Ethan Hunt's world felt truly lived-in and connected in the ways the early entries didn't establish. With Luther and Benji now fixed at his side, Ethan would meet both Rebecca Ferguson's dangerous disavowed MI6 Agent Ilsa Faust and Sean Harris' creepy, dastardly Solomon Lane, one of the franchise's best villains. Battling The Syndicate, a global terrorist operation populated by thought-to-be-dead spies and mercenaries, Ethan faced down his toughest foe to date. Christopher McQuarrie seamlessly stepped into the director's chair and delivered a cracking good time, with a car chase in Morocco, an underwater vault heist (featuring Cruise holding his breath for six minutes), a shoot-out at the Vienna State Opera, and an uneasy alliance between Ethan and Ilsa that felt like a shot of adrenaline for the long-running saga. 1. Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) Fallout delivered in big, unexpected ways. Also known as the "reason why Henry Cavill's face looked so weird and dumb in the Justice League reshoots," this seventh M:I installment not only brought back the sinister Solomon Lane for an encore, making him Ethan Hunt's Blofeld, of sorts, but it also wrapped back around to former flame Julia, connecting Ethan's greatest love to his most diabolical enemy. Because of Lane's return, Fallout felt like a more direct sequel to Rogue Nation, though the connective tissue in Fallout in general made everything done in the Mission: Impossible-verse over the previous decade feel massively satisfying. And the action sequences were just beyond phenomenal. Yes, Tom Cruise doing a HALO jump for real was amazing, but the helicopter chase at the end was something Mission: Impossible fans - hell, movie fans - will never forget. Back in 2018, big showy blockbusters were at all-time levels of popularity, thanks in large part to the MCU, and Mission: Impossible took this opportunity to gift us with its biggest and best film. The Final Reckoning is supposed to feel like the pinnacle, and thematic resolution, of the entire series. But if it falls short, somehow then Fallout can still be that for us. Just a few years earlier. What's your favorite Mission: Impossible filM? How would you rank them all? Vote in our poll and let us know below...
New York Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A ‘Mission: Impossible' Fan Favorite Returns 3 Decades Later. Even He's Surprised.
When Rolf Saxon first auditioned to play William Donloe in Brian De Palma's 1996 'Mission: Impossible,' he didn't think he had gotten the role of the bumbling C.I.A. analyst who is outsmarted by Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt during a break-in at Langley headquarters. He waited an hour and a half for De Palma, who then saw him for just five minutes. Saxon figured that was it. But not only did he get the role, making him a crucial player in what would become an iconic scene, he's now back playing that same character nearly 30 years later in 'Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.' It's a return that distinctly raises the profile of the self-described 'jobbing actor,' who spent the past 10 years mostly doing theater in the Bay Area. 'When this came along, it was like, 'Wow, are you kidding?'' he said in a video interview. 'This is fantastic. This is a nice little cherry on top.' In the first film, Donloe only has a few minutes of screen time. He's a working stooge who is poisoned by Ethan's team in its quest to steal a list of covert agents off his computer housed in a secure vault. While Donloe goes back and forth to the bathroom to throw up, Ethan drops down from a ceiling vent to pull off his caper. When Donloe returns to the vault, he finds a knife on his desk and realizes he messed up big time. His fate is sealed by Kittridge, the Impossible Mission Force official, who says, 'I want him manning a radar tower in Alaska by the end of the day.' Donloe's main role is collateral damage. But according to the 'Final Reckoning' director Christopher McQuarrie, Donloe made a big impact. In fact, he said in an interview, fans frequently asked him when he was going to bring the character back. For a long time, he didn't understand why Donloe engendered such love, until he heard the question framed in a different way: 'When is the team going to do right by what they did to Donloe?' 'And I realized why William Donloe resonated,' McQuarrie said. 'There was a perceived injustice, whether anybody could put their finger on it or not.' So when McQuarrie and his co-writer, Erik Jendresen, were working out the story for 'Final Reckoning,' they hit on where to use Donloe: Members of Ethan's team, including Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Benji (Simon Pegg), have to trek to the Arctic to determine where a sunken submarine is located. In a tiny but cozy home in the middle of nowhere, they find Donloe. He has, indeed, been manning a radar tower. When Saxon, 69, first got wind that McQuarrie wanted to meet with him on a video call, he thought that a friend was playing an elaborate prank. 'I didn't get dressed up,' he said. 'I had just a T-shirt. And then I clicked it and there's McQ. And it's like, 'What?'' Sure, when watching the many sequels — he's seen them all — he occasionally thought of Donloe, 'Why not bring him back?' However, he had no idea that the character had become such a beloved figure. 'In fact, when Chris told me that, I thought it was a way of getting me to do it,' he said. 'I thought he was being nice and generous.' For McQuarrie, enlisting Saxon was something of a risk. He was completely unfamiliar with the actor's work beyond his few beats in 'Mission: Impossible.' But although Saxon has never been a recognizable movie star, he considers himself lucky in his career. 'I've made a living out of it for my whole life,' he said. 'That's something many people can't say.' Born in Virginia and raised in California, Saxon moved to Britain to study at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He spent 32 years in that country, a fact you can tell by his light mid-Atlantic accent with a slightly British lilt. In addition to 'Mission: Impossible,' he had small roles in 'Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and 'Saving Private Ryan' (1998). For a number of years he was the narrator for 'Teletubbies.' Around 2010 he settled in Northern California, where his theater work included the 2018 premiere of 'Eureka Day,' which would go on to Broadway. But acting has also brought Saxon some heartbreak. Over the years he has been cut from multiple films, either partly or entirely. He was worried that would happen again with 'Final Reckoning.' 'I said to Chris that if that's going to happen with this one, I begged him to just let me know,' he said. 'Don't let me find out at the end of the day. And he just looked at me, 'Like, that's never going to happen.'' In the summer of 2023, after he shot his initial scenes, Saxon got a call from McQuarrie and braced for the worst. But the director was not getting in touch about axed scenes. Instead, he was informing him that they wanted him to come back to work. They had added him into the last section of the movie. 'We wrote a small part for him, and we just kept expanding, it kept growing,' McQuarrie said. 'I called Tom and I said, 'You know, I think we're doing ourselves a disservice if we let this character leave the movie midway through.' Tom said, 'I completely agree; he should be there in the third act.'' Saxon was nervous when he first got to set, but he said Cruise, whom he had interacted with only briefly during the first movie, quickly put him at ease. 'He gave me a big smile, a big hug,' he said. 'We spent a couple minutes chatting. It was like I was a long-lost friend.' To prepare to return as Donloe, Saxon imagined what would have happened to him in the decades since we last saw him. He didn't try to recreate his physicality from back then, but he put himself in the mind-set of someone who had essentially been exiled. 'I look at my career 30 years ago and where it is now, and in Donloe's case there's a fundamental difference,' he said. 'He didn't make this choice, and working with that is fascinating for me.' Saxon is reluctant to make parallels between his arc and Donloe's, but there are similarities. Both have been elevated from bit player in Ethan Hunt's story to a major part of his world. For McQuarrie that's a testament to Saxon's performance, which has always been the reason Donloe stood out. (The puking, Saxon said, was added after De Palma saw him making people laugh during downtime on set.) 'There's a humor, there's a dignity, there's a resourcefulness, and what I love is how this character who is an Everyman becomes utterly essential to the story,' McQuarrie said. Though McQuarrie expects Saxon to become a newly hot commodity upon the release of the film, the actor is keeping his expectations in check. 'It's a little bit early to be saying, 'Oh my God I'm going to be a big star,'' he said. 'We'll see.'
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Breath-stoppingly tense': which Mission: Impossible film is the greatest?
Mission: Impossible's slick and sensuous surface bears no trace of the drama behind the scenes making it. During production, the screenwriters of Jurassic Park (David Koepp) and Chinatown (Robert Towne) sent in duelling script pages for director Brian De Palma and producer Tom Cruise to wrestle over. The magnificent outcome is an intense tango between the modern blockbuster and a classic film noir, circling each other warily, and beautifully, like no Mission: Impossible that would follow. De Palma's original is a sexy wrong-man thriller, a Hitchcockian affair that comes disguised as an action-heavy corporate product (or maybe the mask is worn the other way around?). In it, Cruise's coiled IMF agent, framed for the murder of his entire team and surrounded by slippery allies, is constantly trying to play it cool through the plot's knotty parlor games, all while feeling the noose tightening around him. If Cruise's career up to this point was all about often leaving his relaxed boyish middle-American charm on the surface, Mission: Impossible pushed him to try on layers – not just the latex ones – while also pulling off those incredible high-wire stunts, which would only escalate but never improve on the hair-raising tension the first time out. Radheyan Simonpillai By film two, Ethan Hunt is still sort of a blank-slate action man – but John Woo's take on M:I stands out simply by having the highest iconic-moment-per-minute ratio in the entire series. Cruise first appears on the screen free-soloing a mountain and takes delivery of his mission in the form of a set of rocket-delivered exploding sunglasses: then it's straight into the motorbike duels, rubber masks and capoeira kicks, with barely a pause for breath. There is a scene in this film where Tom Cruise flawlessly impersonates a man who is three inches taller than him. There is a stunt where Dougray Scott was encouraged, by Cruise, to put his entire weight on a knife mere millimetres above the megastar's eyeball, just for a cool closeup. The soundtrack is by Hans Zimmer and Limp Bizkit. It might be silly, and Thandiwe Newton described the shoot as 'a nightmare', but no other Impossible is as rewatchable, let alone as fun. Joel Snape It's almost impossible to overstate the importance of Mission: Impossible III. For the franchise it was key (the previous John Woo-directed installment remains a baffling mess), but for Cruise himself it was absolutely vital. The film was released right at his nadir. One year earlier, he had gone off the rails in public – leaping on Oprah's couch, lambasting interviewers for being glib for asking questions about Scientology – and he was three months away from being temporarily sacked from Paramount by its boss, Sumner Redstone. But if Mission: Impossible III delivered, he'd still have a career left to salvage. Luckily it did. Later outings might have outdone it in terms of scale and spectacle, but M:I III was responsible for laying the table for those films. This was the first film where Ethan Hunt was an actual person, not just a smirking mannequin. It was also where we first met Benji, Simon Pegg's superlative sidekick. The stunts had a pleasingly smashmouth quality (check out the way that Cruise is awkwardly flung against a car during an explosion). What's more, in Philip Seymour Hoffman, we had the most intense villain of the franchise. Mission: Impossible III is a great film, but the most perfect thing about it is that it arrived just when Tom Cruise needed it most. Stuart Heritage There isn't really a bad Mission: Impossible sequel, a compliment one would be hard pressed paying to the majority of eight-film-strong franchises (the second, which many would pick, still possesses an aggressively, Limp Bizkit-y year 2000 charm for me). But the one that most effectively packages all of the expected elements is the fourth instalment, Ghost Protocol, which set the perfect blueprint for the latter chapters. Brad Bird might not have been the most stylish of Mission directors (De Palma he is not) but, with a background in animation, there's both a buoyancy and a clarity to the unrelenting action, delivering some of the most thrillingly staged and paced action sequences in the series (has there been anything more exciting than Cruise climbing the Burj Khalifa?). There's also something hilariously demented about Cruise responding to quibbles over his age or longevity in the role by offering us two potential replacements in Josh Holloway and Jeremy Renner and then killing one and emasculating the other. King behaviour, honestly. Benjamin Lee Eleven years after the release of Rogue Nation, it might look less like a highlight than a series turning point, when it switched from accidental director anthology to a long-term collaboration between writer-director Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise. Rogue Nation was the first of four McQuarrie-directed Missions, and the practical, Cruise-endangering stunt work that became a series trademark was, by its nature, repeatedly topped by subsequent instalments. The opening, which merely has Cruise actually hanging on to the side of a real plane as it takes off, camera fixed on him to assure us that it's not an illusion, now seems downright quaint. But as a spy caper featuring stunts (the airplane opener), break-ins (a spectacularly tricky underwater data breach during which Cruise's Ethan Hunt literally dies), noir-ish intrigue (the gorgeous sequence at the Vienna Opera House and the shadowy climax recall both Hitchcock and The Third Man), and sheer blockbuster much-ness (the underwater break-in leads to a car chase which leads to a motorcycle chase), Rogue Nation is the series operating at top level. After many personnel shifts, it establishes a core team of Cruise, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and a stunning Rebecca Ferguson that will power much of the series going forward, and adds in a little extra Jeremy Renner, as a treat. The sequels are a lot of fun with plenty of indelible moments but the truth is, McQuarrie nailed it in one. Jesse Hassenger Some people may cherish Mission: Impossible – Fallout for the glimpse it offers of Ethan's longing for ex-wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan). But for most of us, the film's appeal lies in the way it builds its terrifying vertical action sequences from a series of electric ups and downs in Paris and London to take the world to the brink of destruction as Ethan thrashes about in a chopper in Kashmir. Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie provides the kind of plot twists that would satisfy a silent serial without losing focus on Ethan's route through the moral murk. The European road chases, stunts and perilous parkour have a dash of gritty style, even flashes of lightning, as the camera whips past landmark architecture, while a bathroom fight scene against bright white tile is amusingly inventive – plus there's noir-chic in the low-lit scenes where expositions and betrayals unfold. But the film is best when it loses its cool, with Ethan trying to intercept the detonator to a nuclear bomb, via a monstrously improbable, breath-stoppingly tense helicopter battle in the mountains. Pamela Hutchinson The penultimate Mission: Impossible is the best franchise instalment because it has the best stunt. But, as its Oscar nominations suggest (visual effects and sound design – the only two ever earned by the series), it is a stunt fuelled not just by Tom Cruise's kamikaze bravado but by good ol' VFX and some incredible metal groaning on the soundtrack. It's the film's climax. We're on a gorgeous, posh, blue-and-gold runaway steam train. There's the obligatory knife fight on the roof and a precisely timed leap to liberty by the baddie, but that's just the start. A viaduct ahead is blown up, and – just in time – Cruise and Hayley Atwell manage to disengage the engine, which crashes spectacularly into a ravine, per Back to the Future III. They did actually crash a steam train for this, in Derbyshire, where it caused a bit of a stir. But then – then! – our hero and heroine must leap through the next few carriages as they, too, grindingly slide off the edge of the track and hang for a few moments before the couplers fail and the valley awaits. There's the kitchen car (soup, peppers, gas hob), the dining carriage (crockery, flames, chairs) and, most perilous of all, the cocktail bar (grand piano). It's like The Poseidon Adventure in super-speed miniature, a Buster Keaton upside-down nightmare and the most fabulous thing ever. Catherine Shoard
