# What is the best Tom Cruise action movie of all time?

> From CIA vault heists to zero-gravity freefall, the man keeps raising the stunt bar across four decades. Which mission made the grade?

*By YPB Team · Published May 17, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-tom-cruise-action-movie-of-all-time*

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## Current results (0 votes)

1. **Mission: Impossible - Fallout**
   The 2018 sixth installment, featuring a 98% Rotten Tomatoes score and the series' greatest stunts including a helicopter chase over Kashmir.
2. **Top Gun: Maverick**
   The 2022 blockbuster sequel that became one of the highest-grossing films ever, earning Tom Cruise his biggest box office success.
3. **Top Gun**
   The 1986 classic that turned Cruise into a global superstar, defining 1980s action cinema with its fighter-jet spectacle.
4. **Mission: Impossible**
   The 1996 Brian De Palma original that launched one of the most beloved action franchises in history with its iconic CIA vault heist.
5. **Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol**
   The 2011 Brad Bird-directed entry featuring Cruise scaling the Burj Khalifa and delivering perhaps the franchise's most jaw-dropping action sequence.
6. **Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation**
   The 2015 entry in which Cruise clings to the side of a cargo plane mid-takeoff, cementing his status as Hollywood's greatest action star.
7. **Edge of Tomorrow**
   A 2014 sci-fi action gem in which Cruise repeatedly dies in a time loop during an alien invasion, subverting his heroic persona brilliantly.
8. **Minority Report**
   Steven Spielberg's 2002 Philip K. Dick adaptation, a thrilling sci-fi chase film with prescient ideas about surveillance and free will.
9. **Collateral**
   Michael Mann's 2004 neo-noir thriller in which Cruise plays a chilling hitman forcing a taxi driver through a night of violence in Los Angeles.
10. **Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning**
   The 2023 penultimate chapter featuring Cruise's most audacious stunt yet — a motorcycle leap off a Norwegian cliff onto a moving train.
11. **The Last Samurai**
   The 2003 epic in which Cruise plays an American Civil War veteran who joins and is transformed by a samurai rebellion in Meiji-era Japan.
12. **Jack Reacher**
   The 2012 thriller adapting Lee Child's vigilante hero, featuring a tense car chase and a memorable one-against-five parking-garage brawl.
13. **Mission: Impossible III**
   J.J. Abrams' 2006 entry that gave the franchise emotional stakes and Philip Seymour Hoffman's career-best villain.
14. **War of the Worlds**
   Spielberg's 2005 adaptation of H.G. Wells' novel, a genuinely frightening alien-invasion thriller with Cruise at his most physically committed.
15. **Oblivion**
   The 2013 post-apocalyptic sci-fi in which Cruise plays a drone repairman uncovering a massive conspiracy on a devastated Earth.

Tags: movies, actors, action, classics, all-time