The Entire Mission: Impossible Franchise Recap: Ethan Hunt's Story... So Far

The Mission Impossible series in roughly 16 minutes. Your synopsis, should you choose to accept it, of the story so far. Spoiler alert. Ethan Hunt is the point man in a squad of IMF agents led by his mentor, Jim Phelps, and featuring Jim's wife, Claire. The team is tasked with observing the theft of a secret list of spies under non-official cover, the Knock List, from the American embassy in Prague, and catching the buyer. The mission goes bad, leaving Ethan seemingly as the only survivor. Abort. Repeat, abort. Close your eyes, Mighty Ducks fans. Ethan meets with IMF director, Kittredge, and learns the Knock List was a phony, and the mission was designed to lure out an IMF mole looking to sell the list to a buyer named Max Mitsopoulos. Ethan is now the prime suspect. You wanna shake hands with the devil, that's fine with me. I just wanna make sure that you do it in hell. He flees and figures out how to contact Max himself with the help of Claire, who actually isn't dead. Ethan warns Max the Knock List is a fake, but vows to deliver the real list in exchange for a meeting with the mole. Ethan and Claire recruit two disavowed agents, Luther Stickle and Franz Krieger. Together, they steal the real Knock List from CIA headquarters, where it's guarded rather poorly by this guy, William Donloe. Donloe gets reassigned to Alaska and seemingly exits the franchise until he and the knife Ethan left behind somehow show up again in The Final Reckoning. Knock List in hand, the gang travels to London where Ethan is tracked down by Jim, who, like his wife, is also not dead. You're a hard man to catch up with. Ethan quietly realizes it's Jim who's gone rogue and that Krieger is dirty too. Ethan arranges to pass the Knock List to Max aboard a train, but tips off Kittredge. Disguised as Jim, Ethan then learns Claire is crooked too. The real Jim appears, but kills Claire when he realizes the jig is up. Unsatisfied with simply blowing Jim's cover, Ethan also blows up his helicopter and squashes him with it. Max is arrested, the Knock List secured, and Ethan and Luther are reinstated as IMF agents. Cheers. Kittredge takes a nap for the next 27 years, and we never see Max again, but keep them in the back of your minds for later. Fast forward a few years and Ethan has grown his hair and is super into Limp Bizkit. Unfortunately, another rogue IMF agent, Sean Ambrose, has used Ethan's identity to try and steal a new super virus and its cure from Dr. Vladimir Nikovich. Believing Ambrose's ex-girlfriend Naya to be the best way to get to him, the IMF tasks Ethan with recruiting her. Ethan does so by crashing into her car and sleeping with her. This wasn't exactly by the book. Tracking Ambrose to Australia, Ethan discovers the virus is still in the doctor's Sydney lab, which Ethan plans to destroy, but Ambrose discovers this by disguising himself as Ethan again and tricking Naya. Ethan is ambushed by Ambrose and his henchmen in the lab, but Naya injects herself with the virus instead of handing it over. Ambrose sets Naya loose in Sydney, planning to trigger a pandemic and make billions from selling the cure. Ethan finds Ambrose, but appears to be captured by Ambrose's right-hand man, Stamper, and executed. The victim, however, is really Stamper in the movie's third Ethan Hunt mask, allowing the real Ethan to escape with the cure as it suddenly dawns on the audience why they gave the script to the guy who made Face Off. I'd like to take his face off. After Ethan puts on his sunglasses and the studio really lets John Mu off the leash, Ambrose is killed in a flurry of slow motion, and Naya is cured. Aw. Anyway, forget her, because the next time we pick up Ethan's story, he's now an instructor at the IMF, unbeknownst to his fiancee, Julia. Ethan is sent by fellow IMF agent John Musgrave to rescue a colleague who's been captured by an arms dealer named Owen Davian. Ethan finds her, but she's killed by an explosive implanted in her head. IMF tech expert Benji Dunn tracks Davian to Vatican City, where he's supposed to obtain a mystery object called the Rabbit's Foot. Rabbit's Foot. Ethan quickly marries Julia, then heads to Italy with his team to successfully snatch Davian without IMF authorization. Fortunately, Davian's crew grab Davian back before Ethan can return him and Julia is kidnapped. Davian gives Ethan 48 hours to find and deliver the Rabbit's Foot, but Ethan is apprehended by the IMF and accused of going rogue. We need you to come with us. Musgrave helps Ethan escape, telling Ethan the Rabbit's Foot is in Shanghai. Ethan retrieves it and returns it to Davian, but has a bomb planted in his head in return. You put an explosive charge in your head. Musgrave appears, revealing he's gone rogue and is working with Davian, demonstrating yet again that all the IMF's worst enemies work for the IMF. It's complicated. Ethan escapes, kills Davian, and has Julia electrocute him to disable the bomb. Julia straight up murders Musgrave, saves Ethan, and the two head off on their honeymoon, having never learned what the Rabbit's Foot actually is or does or why it's so mysterious. Rabbit's Foot. What is it? The next time we see Ethan, he's locked up in a Moscow prison. He's broken out and learns that an unknown mole in Russian intelligence plans to buy nuclear launch codes from a deadly assassin. Ethan leads a mission into the Kremlin, but an explosion destroys the building. Ethan's team is blamed and the entire IMF is disavowed. The IMF secretary plans to allow Ethan to escape, but is killed by Russian intelligence. Stay down! Run! Run! Run! Ethan flees the attack with the secretary's analyst, William Brandt. Brandt IDs the bomber as Kurt Hendricks, who blew up the Kremlin to steal a nuclear launch control device. The assassin is trading the codes with Hendricks' partner in Dubai, but Ethan and the team trick each party into a separate meeting. The assassin becomes wise to the ruse, but she's karate'd from the 119th floor. But the other guy, who's actually Hendricks in disguise, escapes thanks to a sandstorm. In Mumbai, Hendricks uses an old Soviet satellite to launch a nuke in San Francisco. But Ethan manages to abort the missile with some 90s catchphrase pizazz. Mission accomplished! As Hendricks watches on dying. The IMF is cleared of the Kremlin bombing and the team regroup in the U.S. with Luther, where Ethan spots Julia and we discover her death was faked by the IMF to protect her. Ethan's next impossible mission has him on the trail of the Syndicate, a terrorist organization that the CIA doesn't believe exists. Ethan is captured by the Syndicate in London, but escapes with the unexpected help of apparently disavowed MI6 agent and Syndicate operative Ilsa Faust. We've never met before, right? In Washington, CIA director Alan Hunley has the IMF disbanded, leaving Ethan cut off, still on the hunt for the Syndicate and its leader, former MI6 agent Solomon Lane. Ethan disrupts the assassination of the Austrian chancellor with the help of Benji, but the chancellor is still killed with a car bomb. Ethan is blamed for the killing and pursued by the CIA, despite everyone always being wrong when they suspect Ethan Hunt is dirty. Whether Hunt lives or dies is entirely up to him. In Casablanca, the team works with Ilsa to steal what turns out to be an encrypted British government file with access to 2.4 billion British pounds. Ethan kills a bunch of Syndicate bikers as Ilsa does a runner with the data, but Benji has made a copy. Of course I made a copy. She wants to use the file as leverage to quit her undercover MI6 mission to infiltrate the Syndicate, but her handler, Attlee, forces her to continue and wipes the file. The Syndicate kidnaps Benji to use him and Ilsa to coerce Ethan to decrypt his copy of the data, which can only be unlocked by the British prime minister. Ethan's plan has Brant work with Huntley and Attlee to secure the British PM before revealing that Ethan has disguised himself as Attlee to prove the existence of the Syndicate, which the real Attlee began without authorization and has been concealing since Lane went rogue. Ethan destroys his version of the data and subsequently lures Lane into a trap where he's arrested. Benji and Ilsa are safe and Huntley has the IMF reestablished, becoming the new IMF secretary. Desperate times, desperate measures. Two years later, the Syndicate has rebranded as the Apostles, a mercenary terrorist group threatening to wreak havoc on the world. The Apostles are enlisted by a mysterious extremist codenamed John Lark, who believes the only path to world peace is through mass suffering and death. Lark and the Apostles are trying to steal three plutonium cores in order to build nuclear bombs with the help of an edgelord mad scientist. Ethan and the IMF gang try to acquire the cores themselves in Berlin, but the mission goes haywire when the Apostles intervene and take Luther hostage. Ethan chooses to save Luther, allowing the Apostles to get away with the cores, and he spends the rest of the movie beating himself up about it. Where's the plutonium? The IMF, with an assist from Wolf Blitzer, gets the scientist to talk, revealing the schematics of the bombs and Lark's location. Lark is going to be in Paris to buy the cores from Alana Metzopoulos, aka the White Widow. Remember Max, the arms dealer from the first movie? Turns out the business runs in the family. Alana and her brother Zola have taken up the trade and are brokering the handoff between Lark and the Apostles. Hunley sends Ethan and the gang to take Lark's identity and intercept the cores, but CIA director Erica Sloan is annoyed by the IMF's tactics. A bunch of grown men in rubber masks playing trick or treat. Sloan sends her own man, August Walker, special activities, to make sure the job gets done. Walker and Ethan halo drop into Paris and corner the supposed John Lark in the men's room, but he gets the better of them until Ilsa Faust pops in to kill him. This prompts a change of plans. Can you still make a mask? I need a face to make a mask. Sorry. Ethan convinces Alana that he's Lark. She gives him one of the plutonium cores as a sign of good faith, but she'll only hand over the other two after Lark frees Solomon Lane from custody. Lane has spent the last two years being shipped from country to country as each tries to extract his secrets with their own benefit. The Apostles' price for the plutonium is their cult leader's freedom. Before the job, Walker meets with Sloan and convinces her that Lark might have been Ethan all along, handing over phony evidence to make his case. That is a serious accusation. Ethan and the IMF successfully kidnap Lane while minimizing casualties, even though Ilsa seemingly betrays the team by trying to kill him. It turns out that Ilsa's mission is to kill Lane on behalf of MI6, who don't want the former British agent spilling Her Majesty's secrets to the entire world. Ilsa agrees in order to prove her loyalty after being undercover with the Syndicate because she wants to return home after life on the run. You need to walk away. I can't do that. Hundley shows up, accusing Ethan of being the traitor. He threatens to arrest the team and take Lane, but it turns out the entire scene was a ruse to force Walker to reveal that he is, in fact, the real John Lark. Sloan, now aware of Walker's betrayal, sends a CIA squad to take everyone in so they can figure out the whole mess back in Washington. But Lark's apostles have infiltrated the agency. They shoot their way out, escaping with Lane, as Walker kills Hundley in the process. Ethan almost catches Walker after some excellent Tom Cruise sprinting, but Walker reveals that he knows where Ethan's ex-wife Julia is and threatens to kill her if he doesn't back off. If I see you again, she dies. He declines to kill Ethan himself on the orders of Lane, who wants his arch-nemesis alive for architect-of-your-pain-style supervillain reasons. The IMF crew, rogue agents, yet again track Walker to Kashmir, where the apostles had previously engineered a deadly smallpox outbreak. Said outbreak was more or less an excuse to establish a medical camp that would hide the two nukes, which Lane plans to detonate at the base of a glacier that supplies water to a third of the world's population. Lane also made sure that Julia and her new husband would be assigned to humanitarian work at the camp, setting the stage for his final revenge against Ethan. Benji and Luther, with help from Ilsa and Julia, work to defuse the bombs, but they can't do anything without Walker's detonator. Ethan chases him down in a helicopter and kills him in a brutal cliffside brawl. The IMF averts disaster at the last possible second. How close were we? The usual. Ilsa delivers a recaptured Lane to MI6, wiping her slate clean. The White Widow, revealed to be working with the CIA, will facilitate the handover. Sloane and the CIA bury the hatchet with Ethan, admitting that the world needs the IMF, while Ethan makes peace with the burden his job has placed on his ex-wife. Ethan's most recent mission begins with the Sevastopol, a Russian stealth submarine equipped with state-of-the-art AI known as the Entity. The crew uses a two-piece cruciform key to activate the AI, at which point it tricks them into shooting a torpedo at themselves, sinking the sub and all souls on board. In the wake of the disaster, every government in the world is scrambling to find the keys, hoping to seize the Entity for themselves, since whoever controls the ultra-powerful AI will essentially be able to reshape civilization in their image. Ethan Hunt is sent to secure one half of the key from Ilsa, who's been targeted with a $50 million bounty. This time, his mission comes from none other than Eugene Kittredge, the CIA director who got a face full of lobster in the very first movie. Ethan helps Ilsa fake her death to avoid the bounty and takes the key, which he refuses to hand over to Kittredge, who admits to setting the bounty himself. Everyone, especially National Intelligence Director Denlinger, wants to use the Entity for their own reasons, but Ethan knows humanity's only chance is to destroy the AI before it takes over. So, you guessed it, the IMF goes rogue. You mean this very conversation is technically an act of treason? Or as we like to call it, Monday. Ethan travels to an Abu Dhabi airport in the hopes of finding the second half of the key, which turns out to be a fake. A master thief named Grace manages to steal the real piece of the key from Ethan. Ethan, meanwhile, is spooked by the appearance of a face from his past. Dead Reckoning drops a pretty big piece of Mission Impossible lore on us here. It's revealed that every member of the IMF, even Ethan Hunt himself, were formerly criminals who were offered a choice to accept the life of espionage and danger in exchange for a clean slate. We don't know all the details, but Gabriel is part of Ethan's pre-IMF past, the man who made Hunt who he is. In flashbacks, we see Gabriel kill a woman named Marie, who Ethan is presumably involved with. Ethan is blamed for the killing and only averts a life sentence by accepting a job with the IMF. Back in the present, Gabriel is working on behalf of the entity itself, a dark messiah who wants to share the gift of death with the rest of the world. Grace gets arrested in Rome, and Ethan poses as her lawyer to spring her. The two are chased by the Italian cops, the feds, led by Agents Briggs and Degas, and the entity's operatives, headed by a French assassin named Paris. Is that everyone? Grace gives Ethan the slip, so the team, now including Ilsa, follows her to Venice, where she meets the person who hired her, the White Widow. Alana has the other half of the key and plans to sell the whole thing on the Orient Express the next day. Gabriel shows up and offers a spooky AI prophecy. He will have the key in his possession, and either Ilsa or Grace will be dead. It is written. He offers Ethan to choose which woman will survive, but he starts a brawl instead, giving Ilsa and Grace a chance to escape. Grace encounters Gabriel on a bridge, but Ilsa saves her, only to be fatally stabbed, for real, by Gabriel. Ethan can't make it in time to save Ilsa, since he was busy fighting Paris, defeating her, but sparing her life. Back at base, Ethan offers Grace the choice to join the IMF, become a ghost, and leave her old life behind. Luther bails in order to isolate himself from the entity, but not before warning Ethan not to kill Gabriel. They realize that the reason the entity had Gabriel kill Ilsa is because it's afraid of Ethan taking Gabriel alive and revealing its secrets. Grace infiltrates the train in disguise, knocks out the real White Widow, and takes the key. She meets with the buyer, who turns out to be Kittredge. He wants to use the entity to protect U.S. interests, revealing that he made an agreement with Alana's mother, Max, to keep her out of prison, which is why her children had become CIA assets. Grace, as Alana, pickpockets the key back from Kittredge after turning down his $100 million offer. Gabriel and Paris are on board the train, too, and they sabotage the controls to prevent the train from stopping, and then meet with Denlinger, who's decided to side with the entity. Denlinger reveals that the entity was originally a U.S. cyberweapon used to sabotage Sevastopol, and that the key unlocks a chamber containing the AI's source code within the sunken sub. Gabriel kills Denlinger to protect this secret, then stabs Paris, since the entity told him that she would inevitably betray him thanks to Ethan sparing her life. Ethan lands on the train and fights Gabriel on the roof. He's about to kill Gabriel when Briggs and Degas, who are also on board, stop him. Gabriel escapes and blows the bridge, but Ethan has the key. Paris saves Ethan and Grace from certain death and tells them that the key unlocks the Sevastopol. It looks like she dies, but she still has a pulse. Got a pulse, got a pulse. Ethan escapes on a speed wing, and Grace tells Kittredge that she wants in to the IMF. I choose to accept. So, to recap, Ethan has the key and knows where and how to stop the entity. So does Gabriel, with the two set to collide in one final reckoning. Will the IMF be able to stop the AI takeover of Earth? What led Ethan to his life of crime? Why is the dude who guarded the knock list back after 29 years, and why does he still have that cool knife? And most importantly, what does the final reckoning mean for the future of the Mission Impossible franchise? We will find out extremely soon, so be sure to follow and subscribe wherever you like to watch IGN. In the meantime, that was seven films worth of wild espionage in 16 or so minutes. That is a lot of action to disavow. One last time.