Mission: Impossible Movies, Ranked By Impossibility Of The Mission

Not only is it the worst Mission: Impossible, it’s also the least impossible mission. Rogue IMF agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) wants to infect the world with the highly contagious Chimera virus, in order to profit from selling the cure. To stop him, Ethan Hunt has to break into Biocyte Pharmaceuticals’ high-security lab. Hunt recruits Ambrose’s ex, Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Thandie Newton), to seduce the villain into uncovering his plan, where she makes a heroic move, injecting herself with the last vial of Chimera to prevent its being unleashed.

That leaves Hunt with a 72-hour deadline, before the virus in Nordoff-Hall becomes irreversible, and while that does add a level of suspense, this was very much Mission: Difficult. Given the challenges described over the next seven entries, you’ll see what made this mission feel so pedestrian in hindsight.

To me, this is the best Mission: Impossible movie ever. No other film in the franchise is as grounded with as many powerhouse performances as this action masterpiece. However, in terms of mission impossibility, it’s still pretty low. In the film, Hunt has 48 hours to retrieve a biotech weapon known as The Rabbit’s Foot and deliver it to Owen Davian (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) or risk this psychopath killing his wife. I’ll admit, Hunt sliding down the slanted glass roof of a skyscraper in order to kill all of the guards was badass, and parachuting into the Shanghai streets was insanely difficult. But, remember, this is an agent who has held his breath underwater for six minutes to swap security cards, jumped out of a plane on multiple occasions, and recently hopped into two planes in mid-air. The fact we don’t even see how he retrieved Rabbit’s Foot decreases the impossibility of the mission significantly.

Here’s the problem with Dead Reckoning Part One: The stakes of the film are cut in half. Sure, trying to stop a self-aware AI program known as The Entity that can digitally scrub people out of existence and trick a submarine into shooting itself is pretty impossible, especially when it has the capability of infiltrating Hunt’s communication systems to direct him away from his destination. However, the real stakes are reserved for the second part of the movie, The Final Reckoning.

The motorcycle jump off a cliff and onto a moving train, fist-fighting on the roof of said train, and almost dying numerous times is just to get a key are not nothing. But it’s still not really that impossible of a mission, especially considering what he’s done in the past.

The impossibility of this mission hinges heavily on one of the most iconic infiltration scenes in movie history. Mission: Impossible set the bar for the minimum acceptability of mission complexity, and most films have succeeded at exceeding it.

While trying to clear his name and unmask a mole in the IMF, Hunt has to silently descend from a ceiling into the most secure vault in America, inside CIA headquarters, to retrieve a list of secret agent identities. Since this first Mission: Impossible relied less on death-defying stunts and advanced CGI, the 1996 film leaned more into human-engineered suspense. The vault is pressure and temperature sensitive, so a droplet of sweat from Hunt’s forehead, running down his glasses, has to be caught while he hangs from the ceiling to prevent it from hitting the ground. In fact, this mission should’ve failed five separate times. That’s a good sign an all-time impossible feat.

Increasing the impossibility of Rogue Nation’s mission is the fact this is the first Mission: Impossible movie where every facet of Hunt’s operation has been compromised from the beginning. Hunt and his crew have to prove the existence of The Syndicate, a mysterious super-network of former agents from various intelligence agencies, all of whom are presumed to be dead. And he has to do all this while being hunted by the CIA.

The U.S. government targeting Hunt is a frequent obstacle in Mission: Impossible movies, but Rogue Nation is the first time the star also has to battle Solomon Lane (Sean Harris)—the smartest Mission: Impossible villain ever—and a team of agents nearly as skilled as he is. Unfortunately, the film’s big weakness—the global threat being more implied than imminent—knocks it down a few on the impossibility ranking.

In Ghost Protocol, Hunt and his team has to stop fanatical nuclear strategist Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist), who has stolen nuclear launch codes and plans to trigger an annihilation that will force humanity into a rebirth. To prevent this, Hunt must scale the tallest building in the world, impersonate diplomats, survive a sandstorm chase and battle Hendricks inside a Russian missile control facility. Oh, and to make matters worse, the entire U.S. government has disavowed him and his team after Hendricks framed them of blowing up the fucking Kremlin in one of the most shocking moments in Mission: Impossible history.

The mission becomes even more impossible when Hendricks actually launches the missile towards San Francisco, and quickly becomes a ridiculous race down a cylindrical car garage to make a last-second effort to disable the bomb seconds before it makes impact. Given how close this came to disaster, the shifting nature of the goal, and the fact Hunt climbs the Burj Khalifa, this is one of the higher impossibility levels the franchise ha

Whenever Hunt can’t save the world by himself, the added variables increases the mission impossibility. In Fallout, Hunt and the IMF have to prevent a global nuclear catastrophe by disabling two synchronized nuclear bombs intended to poison one third of the world’s water supply. This is all made much more complicated, since if you disable one bomb too early, the other one explodes. One more wrinkle: Disabling both of them is only possible after destroying a remote detonator. And all of this has to be done within 15 minutes, while Hunt is twirling around in a helicopter fight, racing to secure said detonator. That doesn’t even factor in how he jumped out a plane in order to save an unconscious August Walker (Henry Cavill) mid-air, a double-agent implanted in Hunt’s operation to monitor him for the U.S. government, who is also sabotaging his mission for psychopath Solomon Lane.

Trusting his right-hand men Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames) to guide him through a prison or off a cliff onto a moving train is one thing, but trusting them—along with his barely-trained wife Julia Meade-Hunt (Michelle Monaghan)—to disarm a bomb while he’s hundreds of miles away in the air is a different level. With all of that factored in, there really is only one other movie with a more impossible mission.

Hunt and the IMF’s main obstacle in every Mission: Impossible movie is usually time, but The Final Reckoning ramps this up to an all new level of anxiety. Our intrepid crew has to stop the evil AI The Entity from launching every country’s nuclear missiles, and to do this they need to let it enter a secure database, in order to trap it on a 5D hard drive. The catch? Grace (Hayley Atwell) has to snatch the hard drive the millisecond The Entity enters.

If she snatches it a millisecond too early, The Entity remains connected to cyberspace and the missiles launch. If she does it a millisecond too late, The Entity safely enters the secured location and the missiles launch. On top of that, Hunt has to insert poison pill malware in the source code module in order to trick The Entity into thinking it’s in the secured database. In the blink of an eye, the world could be reduced to ashes.

The entire world was going to be destroyed if one woman wasn’t quick enough to snatch a hard drive with seemingly impossible precision. And this is while battling an AI program that was literally altering reality and recruiting people inches away from the President of the United States. Without question, the Mission: Impossible franchise ended with its most impossible mission.