Tom Cruise’s creative partnership with Christopher McQuarrie might be the best thing to have happened to the action genre in quite some time. The duo has given us Top Gun: Maverick, one of the era’s best legacy sequels, and they also turned the Mission: Impossible saga into the reigning champ of spy thrillers. McQuarrie’s stamp on the latter can be most acutely felt starting with its fifth installment, Rogue Nation, and he’s since helped wrangle a chaotic franchise with his synthesized, stunt-driven vision.
That uniformity makes it easy to dismiss earlier films, especially black sheep like Mission: Impossible II and III. One couldn’t be more different from the other, but when the franchise was in its infancy, such distinctions were essential to Cruise. The actor, then totally disinterested in sequels, would only return to play Ethan Hunt if he could work with different directors who changed the tone of the saga. Before McQuarrie, Mission: Impossible was a mystery box, offering something new with each new installment. Results varied, but that novelty kept audiences on their toes in a way that McQuarrie’s films, despite their incredible set pieces, don’t.
To watch the first five Mission: Impossible movies back to back (which you can do now, thanks to Netflix) is to look back on a saga that was constantly reinventing itself. Each entry rewrote the status quo without changing the world’s foundations. Aside from Ethan’s trusted right-hand man, Luther (Ving Rhames), the only recurring player was Ethan himself, and each adventure seemed to introduce a different version of him. The Ethan of Mission: Impossible II — a suave, flirty daredevil who finds joy through death-defying stunts — is nearly unrecognizable next to the Ethan of its direct sequel, a potential family man poised for retirement.
Somehow, it all manages to work, although it would have been nice to see the franchise’s best side characters and love interests make repeat appearances (a misstep that McQuarrie would remedy, then totally abandon, with Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust). Each entry introduces a new team of operatives that you can’t help but attach yourself to, and entry number four, Ghost Protocol, makes the strongest case for more uniformity. But the franchise routinely struggles to reconcile Ethan’s madcap adventures with a cohesive narrative, and that split focus has been Mission: Impossible’s Achilles’ heel.
Ghost Protocol marked McQuarrie’s first contribution to the series. It takes the playful nature of its predecessors and marries it with the stiff-lipped sensibilities of McQuarrie’s rewrites, and it may be the best of the franchise for it: while McQuarrie and Cruise’s stunts in successive films have only gotten greater once McQuarrie took the director’s chair, the saga has largely lost its personality. Rogue Nation feels like a generic spy thriller, while the bloated and self-serious Dead Reckoning and Final Reckoning are only saved by the stunning scope of their set pieces.
Though M:I hasn’t always changed for the better under McQuarrie’s regime, he has, of course, brought plenty of good. The franchise always had a checkered reputation; after 30 years of adventures, it’s a miracle that it’s still relevant, and much of that success is a credit to McQuarrie’s work. While the early films largely followed the genre’s trends, McQuarrie’s films have informed a new era for action.
But it’s also important to remember where the saga began, and the first half of the franchise is like a time capsule now, one that captures each major movement of the new millennium. Most importantly, they all hold up fairly well; if Ethan Hunt really has completed his last mission, then we can always go back to the beginning.
The first five Mission: Impossible films are now streaming on Netflix.
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