The Mission: Impossible Franchise Can’t Seem to Figure Out Women

[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.]

Until the year 2023, the most impossible mission faced by the Mission: Impossible franchise was passing the Bechdel Test. Over the first six films, the franchise had shone brightly thanks in part to actresses like Vanessa Redgrave, Thandiwe Newton, Michelle Monaghan, Keri Russell, Paula Patton, Rebecca Ferguson, and Vanessa Kirby — named characters one and all, but women unable to have a single conversation amongst themselves that wasn’t related to a man.

The seventh film does successfully accomplish that very basic task, thanks to a conversation between skilled thief Grace (Hayley Atwell) and international power broker Alanna (Vanessa Kirby) about the job Alanna hired her to do. However, Grace and Alanna’s groundbreaking conversation is followed by one of the film’s many muddled scenes of dialogue, in which AI henchman Gabriel (Esai Morales) declares that Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) will have to make a choice about which of his semi-platonic brunettes will die, a prophecy only sorta fulfilled later.

I say “only sorta” because the foot chase through the streets of Venice that leads to Ilsa’s death doesn’t actually give Ethan much of a choice about who will die — if anything, Ilsa does at least seem to be the one to choose to go after Gabriel, though her reasons for doing so are unclear. Did she feel a need to protect Grace? Did she feel… anything? Who knows. Blame it on the self-aware artificial intelligence that serves as the film’s villain.

This is just one of the many script issues inherent to Dead Reckoning Part One, yet it also points to why using the Bechdel Test as a measurement of a film’s feminism isn’t a great idea. Despite passing the test, and featuring a diverse array of female characters, Dead Reckoning Part One continues the franchise’s proud tradition of being regressive at worst, and weird at best, when it comes to half of the world’s population.

It Could Have Been Worse

The first Mission: Impossible film had four prominent female characters: the two members of Ethan’s IMF team who die in the opening sequence, the eventually untrustworthy teammate Claire (Emmanuelle Béart), and the amazing Max (Vanessa Redgrave), who feels like she’s having an illegal amount of fun in her brief scenes flirting with Ethan. (A 59-year-old Redgrave calling Cruise “dear boy” may be one of the franchise’s sexiest moments, thanks to the unexpected chemistry between the actors.)

Ethan ends the film as a free agent romantically, setting him up for a fling in the eventual sequel with perhaps the franchise’s best-developed female character, Nyah (Thandiwe Newton). The irony, of course, is that Mission: Impossible II is the most misogynistic of the franchise.

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