My final Mission: Impossible ranked list will cover one of the series’ most celebrated aspects: the STUNTS.

These are generally distinct from the set pieces, though sometimes a set piece can contain a stunt. What matters here is that Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, the world’s biggest movie star, performs a death-defying act that would normally only be attempted by an anonymous stunt man.

Cruise doing his own stunts is not a gimmick or an ego trip. It makes the action in these films visceral, because no cutaways or camera trickery are required to distract us from on-set sleight of hand. And, most important, it allows Cruise to act while doing these wild things, bringing a sense of drama and humor to the scenes that would be absent if we couldn’t see the performer’s face.

#7. Mission: Impossible – Train and helicopter

Cruise was already doing his own stunts 30 years ago when this series debuted, but the first film didn’t push any boundaries in its action scenes. It was more interested in the spycraft. The one exception is a thrilling finale that finds Ethan fighting Jim Phelps atop a speeding train while a helicopter follows them closely. Cruise hangs off the train, his face contorted by the g-force, and eventually leaps from the helicopter as it explodes. This is all embellished with special effects, so it doesn’t feel all that distinct from your average action movie.

#6. Mission: Impossible 2 – Rock climb

Cruise did a lot of acrobatic fight choreography in this John Woo film, and zipped around on a motorcycle, but his most impressive stunt comes in the film’s opening sequence. The scene finds Cruise dangling from a rock face, seemingly without the benefit of a harness, and leaping from one section of the cliff to another. Of course ropes were involved, and later erased, but it sure does look like he’s making a do-or-die jump without them. And the fact that he did any of it, with or without safety gear, is impressive.

#5. Mission: Impossible III – Fulcrum jump

Almost all of these stunts involve Cruise doing crazy things in a very high place. In M:I III, he does a base jump off of one building, then swings across to land on an adjacent one. The final scene involved a green screen that painted in the surrounding buildings, while Cruise did the jump from a parking garage. That’s not much of a distinction in my book. He still took a running jump off of a tall structure, and then swung himself pendulum style to another. The CGI makes this one feel a little less special in the finished film, but it’s nevertheless impressive.

#4. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning – Part One – Motorcycle cliff jump

This is another impressive stunt, but one that lost some of its juice when it was overly promoted in the marketing. Hell, it’s even featured in the movie’s official poster. That nitpick aside, I tip my hat to Cruise for riding a motorcycle up a cliffside ramp, then free-falling before deploying his parachute. The skydive is pretty basic for a guy like Cruise (regular people do that on the weekend) but kicking it off with a motorcycle ramp jump? That’s a nifty twist.

#3. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation – Plane jump

Something regular people do not do on the weekend is hang from the side of a cargo plane during takeoff. I saw a behind-the-scenes video of Cruise explaining the intricacies of this stunt, including the concern that an unlucky bird might hit and kill him. He was laughing when he said that.

#2. Mission: Impossible – Fallout – Helicopter chase

Fallout has at least two strong candidates for this ranking, including a HALO (High Altitude, Low Open) jump captured in an unbroken take. That one is incredibly impressive, but I can’t help but give just as much credit to the cameraman who had to do the same thing backwards while filming it. Even more of a wow moment for Cruise comes in the film’s climax, when he climbs into an airborne helicopter by scaling a rope tied to a cargo load, then takes the controls and pilots it through a series of elaborate aerial maneuvers. Professional pilots wouldn’t dare attempt some of these maneuvers, let alone board the helicopter in mid-air from below.

#1. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol – Burj Khalifa

Level of difficulty should place the Fallout helicopter sequence in first place, but I’m going with Ghost Protocol‘s Burj Khalifa scene for the pure ballsiness it took to scamper around the outside of the world’s tallest building. This scene literally took my breath away the first time I saw it, and it’s never gotten old. I love the clever obstacles Ethan runs into while scaling the building, from malfunctioning gloves to a fire hose that’s not quite long enough to get him back to safety. And this might be the best example of Cruise delivering a gripping and funny performance while mid-stunt. His Ethan Hunt can’t believe he’s doing this any more than we can.

That wraps up my category-by-category ranking of the Mission: Impossible films. Out of curiosity, I crunched all of this data to see how the seven films would rank overall if I averaged their performance in these five aspects. Here’s that result:

#1 – Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
#2 – Mission: Impossible III
#3 (TIE) – Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and Mission: Impossible – Fallout
#4 – Mission: Impossible
#5 – Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
#6 – Mission: Impossible 2

This isn’t too far off from my actual ranking of the seven films, which I arrived at with no mathematical assistance:

#1 – Mission: Impossible – Fallout
#2 – Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
#3 – Mission: Impossible
#4 – Mission: Impossible III
#5 – Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
#6 – Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
#7 – Mission: Impossible 2

If I were to appeal to math to create this list, I would have more categories than the five I listed, including basics like Direction, Screenplay, and Acting. So I wouldn’t be surprised if an expansion of the categories resulted in the same list of favorites.

The next question, of course, is where Final Reckoning will factor into all of this. I’ll find that out tomorrow. Can’t wait!