3 Mission: Impossible Twists That Still Surprise Me

Mission: Impossible is a franchise built upon espionage games and massive stunt-action spectacle – which, ironically enough, means that the films have to go the extra mile to surprise viewers. That said, Tom Cruise and the various directors who have worked on the Mission: Impossible films have managed to pull off several big surprises that have made viewers’ collective jaw drop, and still live on to this day as some of the biggest and best shocking twists in blockbuster cinema.

Here are three moments from the Mission: Impossible franchise that still surprise me to this day. Needless to say, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning has a massive legacy to live up to in trying to deliver a fittingly twisty, turny, end to Ethan Hunt’s saga.

The Bombing of the Kremlin

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol was a game-changer for the franchise, as director Brad Bird elevated Ethan Hunt and his Impossible Mission Force (IMF) to near-superhero-level espionage-action heroes. Bird also had an eye for big screen spectacle and action set pieces like few directors before (or even after) him, and there’s one sequence that proves it.

Early on in Ghost Protocol, Ethan and Co. take on the high-risk (or… “impossible”) mission of infiltrating the Russian Kremlin to steal information on a former intelligence officer-turned-nuclear arms dealer named “Cobalt.” However, Cobalt (aka Kurt Hendricks, played by actor Michael Nyqvist) is one step ahead of the IMF; after Ethan and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) pull off the risky infiltration of the Kremline and heist of Cobalt’s personal file, Colbalt blows the operation by outing the team, and then denotating a bomb inside of the building, bringing the entire Kremlin down on the IMF squad. It’s one of the gnarliest times a villain has outmaneuvered Ethan Hunt (but not the only one – see below), and one of the single most globally-impactful events ever to take place within the world of the series.

This is one of those cases where we wish we could be that viewer that never saw trailers for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and got to experience the twist of Cobalt’s double-cross and the Kremlin’s destruction with no prior hint of it coming. As it stands, the shots of Ethan running away at top speed while the iconic location of the Kremlin crumbles behind him is one of the most iconic visuals in Mission: Impossible.

[RELATED: Mission: Impossible‘s 5 Biggest Stunts]

Jim Phelps Is The Mole

When Brian De Palma’s original Mission: Impossible (1996) hit theaters, the stacked cast of stars had many thinking they were in for a 1-to-1 adaptation of the TV show, with its rotating ensemble cast of IMF agents. A lot of the reason for that had to do with the casting of star Jon Voight as “Jim Phelps,” a character who became one of the mainstays of the original M:I TV show (played by actor Peter Graves).

Using Voight and the legacy of Jim Phelps as the basis for a major villain twist was revolutionary at the time of Mission: Impossible‘s release – and arguably still is, in a world where fanboys go rabid about major changes to famous IPs or canonized characters. But De Palma went there in the darkest of ways – making Voight’s Phelps a perfect storm of frustrated foreign policy and unrewarded service, wrapped in a bow of deeply toxic Odepal subtext in the relationship between Phelps, Ethan, and Phelps’ equally traitorous (and conspicuously young) wife, Claire (Emmanuelle Béart). For his part, Voight is a totally Jeykll/Hyde menace in his role when the mask finally drops, and we see how maniacally corrupted and ruthless Jim Phelps has become.

To this day, Mission: Impossible horrifies the mind when you think of how brutally Jim dispatched his own team of IMF agents at the start of the film. That includes pressing the button that got Jack Harmon (Emilio Estevez) a one-way elevator ride to being impaled through the eyes.

The Death of Ilsa Faust

Call it heartbreak trauma, call it recency bias; you can call it whatever you want, it still hurts like hell, and we’re not sure we’re ever going to get over it. Rebecca Ferguson was one of the latest additions to Mission: Impossible but she quickly broke out as one of the greatest – from her very first scene in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, helping Ethan Hunt escape from The Syndicate’s captivity during a brutal hand-to-hand fight in an interrogation dungeon. Ferguson was so good she became a series regular after Rogue Nation – or so fans thought, until she was killed off in a brutal duel with the assassin Gabriel (Esai Morales) in the penultimate film Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning.

Make no mistake: losing Ilsa is the most traumatic loss M:I fans have had to face in the series; it hit even harder after fans had waited years upon years (including during a global pandemic) to get to see Dead Reckoning in a theater. Making it all the way back there just to take such a massive “L” was a gut-punch that still has us winded. What’s even more savage is that director Christopher McQuarrie lures viewers into a false sense of security early on by faking Ilsa’s death – only to bring her back alive – only to really kill her off. It was D I A B O L I C A L.

Rebecca Ferguson has explained that the massive delays in filming Mission: Impossible movies led her to move on to projects like Dune or the TV series Silo. However, fans everywhere are holding out hope that one of the biggest twists of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning will be Ilsa popping out and showing that she’s very much still alive.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning has a release date of May 23rd.