‘Mission: Impossible’ Has a ‘Final Reckoning’ with the Franchise’s Varied Women

Any movie series that lasts for eight entries over the course of 30 years is count to undergo some evolution, and that’s especially true of the Mission: Impossible movies, which reach at least a temporary finale this month with Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. (For the first time in many years, no subsequent entry is in the works, though you can’t completely rule out the possibility of a part nine.) Many of these shifts are yoked to the changes that star and series overlord Tom Cruise has undergone over the decades; the first movie was released at one of his movie-star peaks – the same year as Jerry Maguire, for God’s sake! – and the series has weathered his relationship with stardom, from low ebbs (2006’s Mission: Impossible III) to an impressive sustained comeback (pretty much all of the entries from the 2010s).

One of the biggest series changes is its eventual embrace of the actual team dynamic that informed the original TV series and was largely pared down for the first two movies. In the first film, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt has a skeleton crew consisting of a couple similarly “disavowed” agents (eventual traitor Jean Reno and eventual lifelong bestie Ving Rhames) and his fellow agent and love interest (Emmanuelle Béart). “Fellow agent and love interest” is also Thandiwe Newton’s deal in Mission: Impossible II, which wholesale knocks off Notorious (spy sends his lover on a risky mission to romance an enemy) and features the most car-crash flirtation this side of David Cronenberg. As is often the case with movies of this era, women are central, but principally related as objects of desire. They sit on the line between “at least there’s some sex” and the moment where Anthony Hopkins, as Hunt’s boss in the second film, says of Newton’s mission: “To go to bed with a man and lie to him? She’s a woman. She’s got all the training she needs.”

But once Ethan Hunt gets married in Mission: Impossible III, the team dynamic (and the, ah, training) shifts. His wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan) is not a spy, and the focus is less on Cruise as romantic lead and more his vengeful intensity if anything should happen to his beloved. Julia appears in some subsequent entries but necessarily recedes from the action, eventually kind of replaced in Ethan’s heart by Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a badass British operative who becomes the platonic ideal of a later-period Cruise love interest, emphasis on the platonic: Are Ethan and Ilsa romantically involved? Hard to say. Have they slept together? They certainly caress each other on occasion. Are they close as colleagues can be, or more than that? The movies keep it opaque, not wanting to lean on Cruise’s ability to create romantic chemistry, which has honestly been a little weird since well before the first Mission; it’s hard to find someone who can match his particular form of intensity, especially once he passes a sexual prowling age. The series has aided his transition into a kind of honorable warrior monk whose body was not ultimately built for sex, no matter how unclothed he appears during the latest installment.

Crucially, Ilsa is not the only woman in play during this changeover. In fact, whether owing to market trends or genuine interest in gender parity, Ethan’s teams become more lady-forward starting with the third film. Rhames and Simon Pegg remain Ethan’s Boys, but Maggie Q (Mission: Impossible III) and Paula Patton (Ghost Protocol) precede Ilsa, who hands the baton off to Grace (Hayley Atwell) for the about-to-conclude two-parter. There’s also the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave’s character from the first film, introduced in Fallout; and enemy-turned-teammate Paris (Pom Klementieff) in the final entry.

Of course, actual parity isn’t reached. In fact, it’s kind of a bummer that many of these characters are one-and-done while Rhames and Pegg stick around. Maggie Q is a terrific action star who also wears the hell out of a Vatican-inappropriate dress; Patton has a slightly daffy charm that pairs well with her action-heroine bona fides. (Subverting the seductive honeypot trope, she’s flummoxed by the task of flirting her way around a covert mission, far moreso than the task of kicking an enemy out a 100th-story window.) Some of this stuff may just read as male-fantasy writing of female leads, but the later entries in the series also have some fun with mixing images of traditional femininity and glamour with the action stuff; think of Rogue Nation’s memorable image of Ilsa in a bright yellow dress, aiming a rifle from within the shadowy Vienna Opera House.

Dead Reckoning reaches an apex of this approach when it gets Atwell, Kirby, Klementieff, andFerguson in a room together around its midpoint; has there been a more charismatic collection of actresses in a single scene of a big-budget action movie in the past decade? Two decades? All the performers assembled here have different strengths, all equally unlikely to be well-served by, say, the Marvel machine: Atwell understand the playful Hitchcockian To Catch a Thief vibes of director Christopher McQuarrie’s best moments; Ferguson carries over her gravitas; Kirby reaches back to the more Euro feel of the first film; and Klementieff as the henchman-turned-assassin cuts a comic-book-y figure, Harley Quinn makeup and all.

Final Reckoning lets this powerhouse of feminine power falter. Ferguson’s Ilsa is killed off in the earlier movie, a classic-hack move to further motivate the hero. Kirby is understandably but disappointingly absent. Atwell is basically second lead of the movie, and does well, though it’s a less “fun” role by nature. And Klementieff is delightful, but weirdly has no big one-on-one fight scene, the kind of cliché her vengeful and deadly character seems designed specifically to enliven. As ever, the series prioritizes Ethan’s bromances, which is sweet but sometimes vexing, making it seem as if Ethan ultimately sees specific women as part of the faceless masses he repeatedly saves from annihilation. Even his beloved Ilsa sort of fades into a montage alongside the unnamed woman from Ethan’s past who apparently precipitated his joining of the IMF (and about which the new movie offers no additional information after the previous one teased it).

In a way, Cruise comes close to envisioning a less gendered world; Ethan has a messiah complex that reads as masculine, but he seems eager to transcend not just traditional gender roles but traditional human ones. (It would have ubermensch overtones if he didn’t so assiduously keep to the shadows.) The Mission: Impossible movies try out a lot of different roles for women, indulging in stereotypes and sometimes riffing on them, too. Many of them work cleverly if imperfectly in the moment. But this world has a different set of default genders: Ethan Hunt, and everyone else.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.