The 9 Best Mission: Impossible Stunts, Ranked By How Impossible They Are

It’s sacrilege to have any list involving Mission: Impossible stunts and not include the stunt that started it all. It might not be the wildest or most dangerous move Ethan Hunt’s pulled off, but the ceiling drop in Mission: Impossible is, without question, the most iconic. It’s the stillness that makes it unforgettable. A droplet of sweat could’ve got him arrested. A sneeze almost blew the entire mission. This was the last of its kind before the franchise traded in grounded, semi-practical stunts for the over-the-top theatrics that made it the benchmark of action films.

There are no gadgets. There is no mission. There’s just Ethan Hunt free-climbing on crumbling desert rocks, thousands of feet above sea level...for fun. That was what the spy considered a vacation. We even see Cruise wedge his knees into a crevice, then terrifyingly lean back to rest his body and re-chalk his hands. While the sequence where Hunt slips was performed by a stunt double, Cruise was genuinely climbing these walls himself—albeit with safety ropes that were painted out in post. But, it’s still one of the best parts of one of the worst Mission: Impossible movies ever.

It’s hard enough performing realistic fighting sequences on motorcycles, or dangling from the stage lighting at the opera, but, imagine doing it on the top of a speeding train while dodging low-hanging signs, leaping between cars, and barely clinging on as the train threatens to toss you into oblivion at every turn. Cruise sells every slip, stumble, and surge of momentum with zero green screen in sight. What makes it truly insane isn’t just the risk—it’s how he’s able to have the type of hand-to-hand combat that’s become standard in Mission: Impossible while doing the stunt. And he really is doing it. Both actors were up on the especially built train, moving at 60mph, each of the numerous moments of shock reminding you of what the stakes really are for this stunt.

We’re fully aware that Cruise’s motorcycle cliff jump in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One has been called the biggest stunt in movie history. It is also one of the few stunts so daring that even Ethan Hunt had to pause for a second to realize exactly what he was about to do. The silence when he leaps off the bike mirrors the air being sucked back into your lungs in shock as you watch. The gigantic scenery making Cruise a small dot surrounded by potential danger is sublime. It’s still not the most ridiculous Mission: Impossible stunt ever, simply because it boils down to him riding off a cliff into a freefall before pulling his parachute, but the danger Cruise put himself in, and the spectacular photography of the moment, make it one of the most memorable movie stunts of all time.

The average human can hold their breath underwater for 90 seconds, and is likely to pass out if unable to breathe for longer than two minutes. For the untrained person, brain cells will begin to die after five minutes without oxygen. Cruise was underwater for six minutes filming the pivotal Rogue Nation scene where Ethan Hunt has to infiltrate a water-filled chamber to switch out the security key card disks. Avoiding flailing mechanical arms, then having the key cards knocked out of his hand and having to retrieve them, is tough to watch.

With significant training, and by slowing their heartrates, some people can hold their breath for as long as 25 minutes. Cruise’s six minutes remains an extraordinary feat, especially given he’s performing stunts at the same time, and at the time it was the longest any actor had held their breath for a scene—a record since broken by Kate Winslet while filming the Avatar sequel, where she was underwater for seven minutes and 14 seconds.

This may be the longest the audience ever spends with Hunt freefalling in the sky, and that makes it terrifyingly good. The shot of him falling out of the sky and finding the incapacitated body of August Walker (Henry Cavill) perfectly aligned with the sunlit horizon is both beautiful and visual reminder of just how high he is. And he still had to have the frame of mind to deliver emotive acting, while perfectly timing his fall to catch the falling body. On the right day, you could convince me this is higher on the Mission: Impossible ranking.

Within four minutes of Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation starting, Ethan Hunt was hanging onto the side of an airborne plane while gravity tries to rip the skin off his face. The best Mission: Impossible stunts usually elicit the same reactions: What?! Why? Seriously?! Before we get into how ridiculously insane this stunt is, what really endeared it to me was how I just assumed Cruise’s reckless mentality was about to be on display. This is the fifth film in the Mission: Impossible franchise, so we’ve already seen him dangle from a ceiling vent in Langley, climb Dead Horse Point, and scale the tallest building in the world, all because the mission called for it. So, as soon as he asked Benji if he could open the door on a moving plane, I didn’t just know he was going to climb that plane, I wanted him to.

Now, as far as ludicrous stunts go, this one is hard to top (but we will!). The man was 5,000 feet in the air, holding onto nothing but a plane door with his legs dangling. The continuous shot of the plane getting higher, with no camera cuts, is spectacular and deeply uncomfortable. And that always makes for an all-time stunt. The fact he did this stunt EIGHT times makes it even wilder.

At 2,717 feet, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai is the tallest building in the world. Ethan needed to climb from the 130th floor to the 134th, in order to break into the server room. Did he have an industrial grade pulley system, or a harness, or a Marvel-like superpowers allowing him to shoot up to the level? No, all he had was malfunctioning adhesive climbing gloves and the same upper body strength that allowed him to climb Dead Horse Point in Mission: Impossible II, just now in an older body.

The overhead shots of Cruise gingerly climbing the picturesque glass window with nothing but an 1,800 feet drop below him is enough to suffocate anyone watching with anxiety. You knew he was not going to die because you saw Cruise do interviews for the movie. But, the stunt it so death-defying that for a split second, when he’s dangling from one arm because one of his gloves short-circuited, you believed this was the last time you’d ever see this daredevil again. Oh, and the man also ran across the glass windows and swung from one floor to the next.

All of that, and it wasn’t even the climax of the movie. But, it surely is the most memorable part.

Let’s take a quick second to understand exactly what Thomas Cruise Mapother IV signed on to do. As Ethan Hunt, the adrenaline addict agreed to fly a helicopter while swerving around mountains, doing a 360-degree downward spiral, getting dangerously close to crashing, escaping death by pulling the helicopter up at the right moment. This was all while Ethan is supposed to be in pursuit of genocidal turncoat agent August Walker, trying to stop him from using one of the two nuclear detonators needed to set off two plutonium bombs and poison the water supply of a third of the world’s population.

That alone would have it high on these rankings. It becomes the unquestionably wildest Mission: Impossible stunt when you remember this: before Cruise even gets into the helicopter he’s dangling from onto the landing skids below. He also hangs onto the rope connected to the a large payload, onto which he falls 40-foot backwards. This man did a blind fall off of a fucking helicopter attached to nothing more than a safety line that was only there so, “if Tom was killed during the stunt, we wouldn’t be looking for his body in the bushes,” according to Fallout director Christopher McQuarrie.

Tom, if you’re reading this, thank you for being an absolute lunatic so we can all have 10 minutes of thrilling action. Also, thank you for not dying. That would’ve sucked.