I came across this comment while doing what everyone does when they have absolutely nothing better to do: doom-scrolling through YouTube clips until the algorithm eventually decides what kind of evening you're going to have.
The clip in question was from Mission: Impossible 7, Dead Reckoning, specifically the now-famous scene where Ethan Hunt lines up a motorcycle, opens the throttle and rides it straight off the side of a mountain before pulling the ripcord on the parachute conveniently strapped to his back.
Apparently, according to one enthusiastic commenter, this was the “Best Movie Ever!”
All I could think to reply to that was, “You must live a pretty sheltered life.”
That comment got me thinking about the Mission: Impossible series as a whole, and more specifically about why I’ve slowly lost interest in it despite being somebody who genuinely likes spy movies.
When it comes to the iconic spy franchises, I’ve always been more of a James Bond guy, but I used to enjoy Mission: Impossible too. Somewhere along the way, though, I stopped feeling like I was watching Ethan Hunt perform espionage and started feeling like I was watching Tom Cruise look for increasingly creative ways to almost kill himself. I think that's where the series started losing me.
The original Mission: Impossible from 1996 wasn’t perfect, I'll admit, but it was a genuinely good espionage thriller. There was betrayal, misdirection, surveillance, competing agendas and people lying to one another while Ethan tried to figure out who he could trust and what was the truth. More importantly, the movie understood how to make espionage itself tense.
When I think Mission Impossible, my mind still goes instantly back to the CIA vault sequence. Ethan is lowered from the ceiling into a highly secured room where he can’t touch the floor, can’t make too much noise and can’t allow the temperature in the room to change significantly. Nothing is exploding. Nobody is shooting at him. He isn’t hanging from an aircraft. He is simply trying to steal information without making a mistake, and somehow a bead of sweat becomes one of the most terrifying things in the entire movie. I fucking loved every minute of this scene.
The technology is there, obviously. Ethan has a cable rig, the computer equipment and all the rest of it, but none of that actually solves the problem for him. The equipment gets him into the room, but he's still just a man who has to show a high level of professional skill to get the job done. This is a showcase of why Ethan Hunt is an elite spy.
The second movie still had a reasonably interesting premise, although John Woo certainly wasn’t interested in subtlety. Tom Cruise opens the movie free-climbing a rock face for no apparent reason other than to let us know Ethan Hunt is now EXTREME, then he receives his mission through a pair of Oakley Romeos with all the subtlety of somebody interrupting the movie to show you what sunglasses you should buy. By the end we’ve got motorcycles, slow motion, explosions, birds flying around indoors because John Woo apparently receives a royalty every time a dove enters frame, and motorcycle tires that seem to magically change from road slicks to off-road knobbies depending on what surface Ethan happens to be riding across.
It was silly, but it was still recognizably Mission: Impossible and fairly interesting as a spy movie.
By the third movie, though, we’re already getting into more familiar action-movie territory. Dangerous thing everybody wants, evil organization, woman Ethan loves gets threatened, Ethan goes charging in to save the day.
Don't get me wrong, Philip Seymour Hoffman is fantastic as Owen Davian and deserves some major credit because he makes the character genuinely menacing without turning him into generic supervillain #3. The plot around him, however, got to feeling pretty basic.
At the same time, the "Stunt Show" dial begins turning up. Tom Cruise slides down rooftops, hangs from helicopters, hangs out of vehicles and has an explosion behind him that throws him sideways, for some reason, into a parked car.
It’s impressive stunt work, for sure, but I started feeling like I was watching two movies at the same time. One was about Ethan Hunt the spy. The other was about Tom Cruise the actor turned stuntman. As the series went on, we seemed to lose the first movie and the second movie took over.
Ghost Protocol is probably where the modern formula really starts to announce itself. The IMF is compromised, Ethan and his team are blamed, and we get another variation of the “good guy gets accused and has to prove his innocence” setup. Nothing particularly groundbreaking, as far as story plots go. Then Ethan has to climb the outside of the Burj Khalifa using gloves that somehow allow him to stick to the building like Spiderman.
In a clear case of "saw that coming", the gloves begin to fail, which should have made the scene more exciting, but it also framed something that was now bothering me about Mission: Impossible. The technology was no longer just helping Ethan do his job. The technology was becoming part of the mechanism required for the screenplay to work.
Without the gloves, Ethan doesn’t climb the building. Without the building climb, there is no spectacular stunt. Without the stunt, there is no marketing campaign telling us Tom Cruise really climbed the world’s tallest building. The stunts were, clearly, starting to drive the story instead of the story naturally producing the stunt. In fact, this is also when the cover art for the movie started depicting the movie's key stunt scene rather than anything related to the story.
By Rogue Nation, we get another version of Ethan operating outside the system because the IMF is considered reckless and gets dissolved into the CIA. Everybody thinks Ethan has gone rogue, nobody believes the threat is as serious as he says it is, and he has to keep working anyway... Again.
This time we got a stunt in the form of Tom Cruise hanging from the side of an Airbus A400M while it takes off. The stunt took place during a short introduction to show Ethan on the job. Guess what the cover art for the movie was?
It was around this time, just after I finished watching Rogue Nation, that I started wondering whether I was watching an espionage franchise or a very expensive episode of Jackass starring a man with considerably better insurance. Virtually all the promotional material surrounding this movie included that stunt, which had virtually no part in the movie's plot. We were sold a stunt claiming to be a movie!
Fallout is yet another perfect example of how far this had gone. You’ve got the HALO jump, which made it as the typical "not gonna reveal anything about the plot" cover art. Then you've got the Paris motorcycle chase, helicopters, cliff climbing, more helicopters, Tom Cruise flying one of the helicopters, Tom Cruise hanging from the helicopter, then Tom Cruise climbing things after the helicopter crashes. Apparently they wanted Tom to show every possible relationship a human being can have with a helicopter. Visually impressive, but spy material?
You see, my issue is where the tension is coming from. In 1996, suspense came from whether Ethan could remain almost completely motionless in a secure room. Twenty years later, suspense increasingly came from whether Tom Cruise was going to physically survive making the movie.
That brings me back to the motorcycle jump in Dead Reckoning. Driving a motorcycle off the side of a mountain, releasing the bike, going into freefall and opening a parachute takes a level of nerve I absolutely do not possess. I would have looked at the ramp, looked at the cliff, turned around and asked where catering was.
The problem is that the stunt became the identity of the movie long before I knew much of anything about the story. People were talking about how Tom Cruise really did it, how many times he practiced it and how dangerous it was. When your audience knows more about how a stunt was filmed than why the character is doing it, something has shifted. You almost get the sense somebody walked into the writers’ room and said, “Tom wants to ride a motorcycle off a mountain,” and everybody else had to figure out why Ethan Hunt would ever need to do that. This might be how you write a good action movie, but it's certainly not how you manufacture a great spy movie.
This also gets into the way Mission: Impossible uses technology, because I think that’s another major difference between it and some of the, arguably better, competition this series has in the genre of spy movies.
James Bond has always had his toys. That’s part of the fun of watching a James Bond movie. Q walks Bond through some ridiculous collection of gadgets, Bond barely listens, Q gets annoyed, and everybody in the audience knows that weird fountain pen, watch, tracker or modified Aston Martin is going to show up again later. Some of those gadgets absolutely save Bond’s ass, but the better Bond movies usually establish that Bond himself is dangerous long before Q hands him anything.
Take away the toys and Bond can still manipulate people, bluff, fight, shoot, drive, read a room and figure out which person matters before everyone else has finished pouring their drink.
The original xXx with Vin Diesel played with the same idea in a much sillier early-2000s way. Xander Cage gets introduced to an assortment of ridiculous spy equipment, mocks half of it, and then eventually finds dramatic ways to use most of it. It works because the gadgets feel like a glimpse behind the curtain. Here’s all the bizarre stuff the spy department has sitting around downstairs.
Mission: Impossible increasingly handles that technology differently. Ethan doesn’t just benefit from it. He frequently needs it.
- He can’t climb the building without the magic gloves.
- He can’t pass as someone without a mask-printing device.
- He can't impersonate someone without a voice box device.
- He can't navigate without someone on an ear piece.
- He needs remote hackers doing on-demand hacking.
The technology doesn’t expand what Ethan can do; sometimes it becomes the reason he can do it. I think the masks might be the best example of how much this changed.
In the original concept, a disguise involved planning. You needed the mask, but you also needed the voice, the mannerisms, the knowledge and the confidence to actually impersonate the person. The mask helped perform the deception, but the operative still had to sell it. Eventually the series gets to the point where somebody can scan a face, stand beside a machine while it goes brrrrrrrr for a few seconds and suddenly congratulations, you’re Steve. Slap a patch on your adam's apple and you even sound like Steve.
At some point you have to ask whether the spy is performing espionage or whether the technology is doing the work and the spy could just be anyone they pulled off the street.
This is where the Bourne movies become really interesting to compare, because Jason Bourne barely has any toys at all. His superpower is competence and training. Even with amnesia, he can still walk into a room and notice the exits. He watches reflections, remembers license plates, notices who is looking at him and improvises weapons from whatever happens to be nearby. He doesn’t need someone in his ear with a map of an airport, guiding him through it every step of the way. In fact we see him not only guide himself, but also another in a completely fluid situation that changed every second. He knew where the enemies were, he knew where to guide his partner, he knew interception points, he even put together there was a sniper before the first shot rang out. His own brain has effectively become the gadget.
That is what makes Bourne interesting to me as a character. Arguably he's not a spy, but this is still a story about espionage and the character himself is the weapon. He doesn’t need some miracle device to make him dangerous because the training, awareness and instinct are already there. If you ask Bourne for his gadgets he'd just look at you and go, "What gadgets?"
Bond eventually moved back in that direction too. When Daniel Craig arrived in Casino Royale, Bond suddenly felt physical again. He bled. He made mistakes. He got exhausted. He was poisoned. He got emotionally destroyed. He beat people with whatever happened to be within reach.
The gadgets didn’t disappear entirely, but they stopped feeling like the point. For me, Casino Royale and Skyfall are among the strongest Bond movies in decades because they remembered that Bond was interesting before Q opened the briefcase, not because of the gadgets he received from Q.
John Wick is another interesting comparison even though he obviously isn’t a spy either. When we talk about the first movie, Wick has access to this underground network of hotels, doctors, weapons dealers, cleaners and information brokers who all operate within a world ordinary society doesn’t even seem to know exists. It gives him that level of espionage that makes him very much spy-like, regardless of the fact he's not. That said, just like Jason Bourne, John Wick himself is still dangerous without that support network.
Give him a gun and he’s dangerous. Give him a knife and he’s dangerous. Give him a pencil and apparently you should start saying goodbye to your family. His reputation carries weight because people fear him, not any kind of technology he holds or what organization he's associated with.
That said, the John Wick series eventually starts falling into the same escalation trap as Mission: Impossible has done. Every sequel had to become bigger. More enemies, more bullets, more ridiculous injuries, more people hitting John Wick with cars only for him to stand up thirty seconds later as though somebody bumped into him with a shopping cart. By the later movies he’s falling off buildings, tumbling down absurd flights of stairs and getting shot repeatedly into his apparently magical bulletproof suit.
Maybe that’s one of the biggest problems with successful action franchises in general. Once you’ve done something impressive, Hollywood seems terrified of doing something equally impressive again. It has to be bigger. If Ethan hangs from a train, next time he needs to hang from a plane. If he hangs from a plane, he needs to fly a helicopter. If he flies a helicopter, he needs to jump a motorcycle off a mountain.
Eventually I assume we’ll get Mission: Impossible 11, where Ethan Hunt straps himself to a SpaceX booster and infiltrates Russia by re-entering the atmosphere over Moscow.
The problem is that somewhere in that escalation, the creative question changes. Instead of asking, “How would this character solve this problem?”, you start asking, “How do we top the last movie?” Once that becomes the priority, the story starts becoming responsible for delivering the stunt instead of the stunt existing because of the story.
James Bond has absolutely suffered from this problem too. The Pierce Brosnan era is a perfect example. GoldenEye had a genuinely interesting premise and some great moments, but the movies increasingly started sliding toward spectacle for spectacle’s sake. Then you get Tomorrow Never Dies with the remote-controlled BMW that apparently can take bullets and sledgehammers while sitting still, yet once Bond starts driving it the windows seem ready to explode if somebody sneezes in the general direction of the car.
Things kept getting sillier from there.
I don’t blame Brosnan for any of that. He was a perfectly good Bond working with increasingly questionable material. The difference is that Bond has one major structural advantage over Mission: Impossible. Eventually, Bond can reset.
When we get a reset with Bond we end up with a new actor, new tone, new visual style, new interpretation and sometimes an entirely different level of realism. The Daniel Craig era basically gave the franchise permission to say, “Okay. Enough. Start over.” and it was absolutely epic.
Mission: Impossible doesn’t really have that option anymore because Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt and Ethan Hunt is Mission: Impossible. The actor and the franchise have become inseparable. Cruise has also built much of his modern identity around performing increasingly dangerous practical stunts, and Mission: Impossible has become the perfect vehicle for that obsession.
The man is spectacularly good at what he does. I’m not questioning that. I’m questioning whether Mission Impossible is still a good espionage series or if it's changed genres into your typical Action movie.
The first movie was an espionage thriller that contained action. The modern movies feel much more like action spectacles that contain espionage. That distinction explains almost everything I've been seeing.
Someone watching Dead Reckoning sees Tom Cruise drive that motorcycle off the mountain and thinks, “That was fucking incredible.” I’m watching the same scene thinking, “Whatever happened to the movie where a bead of sweat almost ruined the entire mission?”
The modern Mission: Impossible audience seems to be going there less to watch one clever spy outwit another clever spy and more to see what ridiculously dangerous thing Tom Cruise can physically do this time. I just find myself mourning the spy franchise that existed underneath all of that.
For me, the most interesting thing about an elite intelligence operative isn’t that he can survive falling off something very high. It’s that he can walk into a room, understand what’s happening before everyone else does and manipulate the situation without anybody realizing they’ve been manipulated. That’s why Bourne works. That’s why the best Bond movies work. That’s why the original Mission: Impossible worked.
The technology should expand what the spy can attempt. It shouldn’t be the reason he’s capable of attempting it. The action should come out of the story instead of the story being built because Tom Cruise found another mountain to do a stunt on.
That’s ultimately what bothers me when somebody points at the motorcycle jump from Mission: Impossible 7 and calls it the “Best Movie Ever.”
It’s a spectacular stunt. But somewhere along the way, I think we started confusing how difficult a movie was to make with how good the story was to watch.
Mission: Impossible used to make me wonder whether Ethan Hunt was clever enough to accomplish the impossible. Now it mostly makes me wonder whether Tom Cruise is crazy enough to attempt it.
At this point, I think we already know the answer to that one.
