The weakest entry by far in a franchise that took decades to secure greatness averts disaster on streaming

There’s no shame in being deemed the worst entry in one of the greatest franchises of all-time, even if it took Mission: Impossible a while to attain classic status.

That’s not to say it was a worthless saga for the first decade and a half of its existence, but it was only after an extended hiatus following the third installment that things really began to take flight. If we take the early reactions to Dead Reckoning – Part One into the equation, then the last four installments have netted respective Rotten Tomatoes scores of 93, 94, 97, and 98 percent, which is quite frankly astonishing.

None of the first three even managed to score above 71 on the aggregation site, which unfortunately leaves John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II at the very bottom of the pile. It is admittedly the weakest of the septet by far, but there’s still plenty of blockbuster spectacle on display, which was the bare minimum to be expected from cinema’s premiere action star mixing it up with one of the genre’s greatest-ever directors.

The plot is absolute nonsense, though, even if that isn’t one of the main reasons why anybody turns up to the theater to see what shenanigans Ethan Hunt has gotten himself into now. With the seventh entry on the horizon, Mission: Impossible II has been capitalizing on the raised awareness to mount a comeback on streaming, with audiences in the mood for bingeing the back catalogue.

Per FlixPatrol, it’s one of the biggest hits on Paramount Plus at the moment, even if there are quite literally six better M:I adventures to choose from.