Mission: Impossible has established itself as one of the most successful action film franchises in Hollywood today, maintaining a high level of quality even after seven movies. In fact, each subsequent entry in the franchise has sought to outdo the previous one by crafting better stories and bigger action sequences.
But what really makes the Mission: Impossible movies work so well is the delicate balance that it cultivates between the old and new. Throughout its 26-year run, the Mission: Impossible franchise has stayed true to its roots, reiterating classic tropes in every next entry in new and exciting ways that never feel tiring. These recurring tropes are almost like a calling card to the franchise, making every movie feel right at home with the Mission: Impossible title, and allowing it to weave the same magic as the older entries. Here are 13 of the coolest recurring trope in the Mission: Impossible franchise, ranked.
13 Rogue Agents
The rogue agent trope is central to almost all the Mission: Impossible movies, and demands the first mention. These rogue agents may sometimes be the key antagonist to the story, as is the case with Mission: Impossible 2. More often than not, however, the rogue agent is Ethan Hunt himself. In fact, this is a big part of the very first movie in the franchise. Armed with a heavy conscience, Hunt is often willing to disobey direct orders in order to do the right thing. Sometimes, though, Hunt is trapped into this position by hidden enemies, which is where the next trope comes into play.
12 Spies Within the Agency
Betrayal is a standard part of the Mission: Impossible formula. Ethan Hunt was first betrayed in a big way in the first movie, then he went on to get betrayed a few more times. Better known as the mole, spies within the agency is a character trope that the Mission: Impossible franchise used as frequently as the rogue agent. Some of the Mission: Impossible moles are short-lived characters that nevertheless leave a mark; others are remembered as iconic villains in the franchise as a whole.
11 Techno MacGuffins
The MacGuffin is a well-known plot device and refers to an object in a movie that is sought after by the heroes and the villains alike. It is typically something highly valuable, often one-of-a-kind, and usually has no other impact on a movie than to drive the plot. It’s a classic spy movie trope, and Mission: Impossible keeps things moving by using MacGuffins in every single movie.
MacGuffins in Mission: Impossible movies are usually dangerous technologies like biological weapons and nuclear codes. The franchise has always made good use of this trope, allowing the dangerous implications of the techno MacGuffins to escalate the stakes in a palpable way. Its latest entry, Dead Reckoning Part One, has gone one step further to transcend the trope in a definitive way: the movie sets Ethan Hunt and his team on the trail of a self-aware AI known simply as The Entity, posing it both as the film’s objective as well as its supposed antagonist.
10 Cool Spy Gadgets
What’s a spy movie without a few spy gadgets thrown into the mix? It’s a nifty part of real espionage history that has been kept alive by innumerable cinematic reimaginations through the years. The Mission: Impossible films have used their fair share of fictional spy gadgets with tools like exploding chewing gums, Spider-Man gloves, and contact lenses that double as scanners.
9 Mandatory Mission Briefing Scenes
In a direct callback to the original Mission: Impossible TV series from the 60s, the films also include a scene where Ethan Hunt receives his mission briefing through a high-tech recording device. This was a standard episode format for the television series, where one of the team leaders would get a mission briefing through a tape recording, which would self-destruct afterwards. The movies introduced some cool mission briefing devices, which included things like a self-destructing pair of sunglasses. The briefings in the movies also echo the phrasings of the TV series with such words as, “Your mission, should you choose to accept it.”
8 Over-the-Top Disguises
Freakishly realistic facemasks are an unusual mainstay of the Mission: Impossible film series, and it has used them often enough for it to deserve a separate section entirely. We see them all the way back in the very first moments of M:I 1, and they have proven a handy tool for Ethan Hunt to infiltrate buildings or make dramatic escapes. Some of the coolest twists in the franchise have been set up using these facemasks.
7 Thrilling Vehicular Chases
When it comes to the flashy bits, you can always count on a Mission: Impossible movie to have a thrilling vehicle chase scene where Tom Cruise handily demonstrates his “need for speed.” A well-known daredevil in real life, Cruise is an expert driver of cars, motorcycles, and airplanes, owning all three kinds of locomotives in his personal collection. And he absolutely loves to put these skills to use in a movie.
Cruise has delivered some of cinema’s most epic vehicle chases through the Mission: Impossible movies. An exciting vehicle chase through winding exotic streets is something you simply expect with this franchise today, and it has only improved its chase scenes in subsequent entries. With Dead Reckoning Part One, the franchise pays a subtle homage to those small car chases in older spy movies through the Fiat 500 chase scene, set quite fittingly in the cobbled streets of Rome.
6 Captivating Opening Scenes
An important reason why the Mission: Impossible franchise has been so successful is because it values the entertainment quotient without taking the audience for fools. Despite featuring so many classic tropes, Mission: Impossible movies never feel like a heartless recombination of popular trends. It lends the movies an enduring quality, while keeping the important thing at the front and center: entertainment.
Keeping with this idea, Mission: Impossible movies always start off with a bang — whether with an intense spy infiltration, or a thrilling chase. It makes for an interesting study because on the one hand there is the creative variety, and on the other there are those openings that are quite candid in their intents to impress and captivate. The best example of this is in Mission: Impossible 2, where the opening scene is literally Tom Cruise climbing a mountain. But it’s still shot and executed so brilliantly that the audience is fully invested by the time the scene ends.
5 Intense Tom Cruise Sprints
Did you know that the more Tom Cruise runs in a movie, the better the movie performs? The Hollywood legend’s love of running is so widely known that Rotten Tomatoes compared his cinematic runs to his box office performance, and discovered a stunning positive correlation. As the central protagonist of the franchise, Cruise running has become an indispensable part of the Mission: Impossible formula as well, and way too many scenes in the film series center around this inimitable Hollywood phenomenon — enough to rank them in order of excellence.
Like the franchise’s iconic vehicle chases, Cruise trotting furiously through the streets has become something one expects in any new Mission: Impossible movie. The truly impressive feat is that this mandatory scene always ends up being as exciting as the next big stunt sequence.
4 Compelling Villains
Mission: Impossible has also found itself some compelling villains to keep things interesting, and this has turned out to be more and more true with each new sequel. From the unforgettable performance of Philip Seymour Hoffman in Mission: Impossible 3 that set the franchise on a new course, to much-lauded performance of Esai Morales in Dead Reckoning Part One, the franchise has certainly given us some powerful villains.
3 High-Stakes Infiltrations
High-stakes infiltrations are a core part of spy movies in general, bringing together many of the genre’s typical charms. The Mission: Impossible franchise in fact has an even stronger relationship to this trope as the original TV series was envisioned with elaborate heists and infiltrations at the center of every single episode. The creators of the series discarded all the extraneous elements and sought to put all their focus on the suspense, and the precisely timed heists and infiltrations written out for every single episode.
In introducing the franchise to a new generation, the Mission: Impossible movies held true to the emotional components that make such scenes exciting and utilized all that modern cinema technology had to offer to craft bigger thrills. Some of these infiltration sequences became the captivating opening scene of a Mission: Impossible movie; others, like the Burj Khalifa sequence in Ghost Protocol, became iconic stunt sequences in cinema itself.
2 Highlight Stunt Set-Piece
Perhaps the single biggest signature of the Mission: Impossible franchise are its seemingly impossible, extremely outlandish stunt set-pieces, which are featured as highlight moments in every single movie. Typically executed by Cruise himself, the highlight stunt set-piece of a new Mission: Impossible movie has become something of a Hollywood phenomenon. Cruise has seemingly taken on the personal challenge of outdoing himself in each next entry of the franchise, performing bigger and bigger stunts with each next movie. It reached the point where the highlight stunt of Dead Reckoning Part One, a base jump involving a motorcycle, became a major promotional feature for the movie in the days leading up to its release.
1 Tom Cruise Himself
Lastly, we have Tom Cruise himself. While an actor cannot be a trope all by themselves, they definitely can be when they embody such a distinctive style of cinema unto themselves. Professional madlad Tom Cruise has become widely recognized as Hollywood’s last true movie star, and his work with the Mission: Impossible franchise, both as an actor and a producer, has been instrumental in this public assessment. These movies stand as the testament to his relentless perfectionism and his drive for creating unforgettable cinematic experiences. Clearly, the franchise wouldn’t be where it is without him.