While M:I:III represented a significant improvement on its predecessor in terms of critical opinion, that improvement wasn’t necessarily reflected in the box office returns, which were lower than that of its predecessor. Some of the responsibility for this was laid at the door of us now being in a post-Bourne world, where a more traditional spy thriller about a benevolent secret agency trying to save the world didn’t have the same appeal. Some laid it at the door of Cruise himself, still playing the same sorts of leads he had for decades, with the franchise centring far more on him than anything else. One thing was certain – the franchise was still searching for some elusive formula that could enable it to cleave closely to its genre and source material, while appealing to a modern audience. With JJ Abrams busy on other projects, directing duties fell to Brad Bird, for whom this would be his first live action feature. Greg D. Smith wonders if he could find the tone the series needed?

When an individual known only as Cobalt acquires access to nuclear weapons, Hunt and his team must try and stop him acquiring the necessary launch codes from a deadly assassin who herself obtained them from the dead hands of one of the IMF’s own. When matters take a turn for the worse, the team finds itself disavowed and operating alone to try and stop nuclear disaster from overtaking the world.

There’s a lot going on in Ghost Protocol. An awful lot. At a glance, it might seem like the same old tired narrative being played out – madman steals nuclear weapons and seeks to inflict mass destruction with them, Ethan and his team are disavowed and must operate off the grid to save the day. So far so expected. But it’s specifically what the movie does with these core conceits, and the way in which packs an awful lot of tangential character development along the way, which really elevates this from just another sequel to what was – at the time – the very highest point for the series as a whole.

In fact, it’s in our villain where we actually see a first for the series. The opening two movies, at base level, are about broadly the same thing – a disillusioned IMF agent betraying everything the organisation stands for to make money for themselves. Phelps and Ambrose may share little in the way of obvious similarity, but break down both their arcs, and both basically point to that same conclusion. M:I:III flirts with something different by bringing in Davian, but ultimately it’s another tale of a man working in the IMF who is following his own agenda. In his case it’s more misguided patriotism than simple greed, but the fact remains that for its first three instalments, the Mission: Impossible franchise delivered us bad guys all cut from the same (IMF standard) cloth. Number 4 changes that, in a way that’s simultaneously regressive and exactly the shot in the arm the series needed. Kurt Hendricks, the man behind the shadowy figure known as Cobalt, is a man with a fanatical belief in doing something horrible. In many ways, he’s a traditional genre bad guy, looking to acquire nuclear weaponry to achieve his goals. But Hendricks is no simple thief, no common criminal driven by venal greed. Hendricks is a believer – his goal is nuclear war between Russia and America, a giant reset switch for humanity, such that those few who remain will be stronger and better. Not for him a ransom note or a desire to rule. He simply wants to do what he thinks is necessary.

Thus, with the stakes raised, we get a set of increasingly elaborate set pieces as the team attempts to put a stop to all of this. The Kremlin scene early in the movie gives us another one of those moments in the series of sheer surprise. Having lulled us into a false sense of security with a two hander heist between Hunt and Dunn (newly promoted to field work and very nervous) and all the near misses and laughs caused by Dunn’s awkwardness against Hunt’s quiet confidence and mid frustration at his colleague, the film then just sets off a nuclear bomb directly underneath the Kremlin, allowing our bad guy to get away with exactly what he came for and leaving the team high and dry. The others having escaped, Hunt takes the rap, and meets up with SVR agent Anatoly Sidorov, who is convinced that Hunt is responsible for what amounts to an act of war. The ongoing cat and mouse game between Hunt and Sidorov which ensues is just one of the many moving parts that the movie successfully juggles, and it wisely avoids this becoming any sort of ‘buddy cop’ type routine. There’s grudging professional respect on both sides, even beyond Hunt’s frustration at the hindrance Sidorov represents to him doing his job and Sidorov’s conviction that Hunt is guilty, and the film lays it on in the just the right way that when they finally meet in the middle at its conclusion, it’s a quiet, but nonetheless triumphant moment.

Tom Wilkinson’s brief appearance in the movie as the current IMF Secretary (surely the most thankless and risky job in all of IMF given the rate at which they seem to change) is a nice contrast again to previous movies where the agency is convinced of Hunt’s guilt and determined to bring him down. This Secretary lays out exactly what should be happening, then calmly explains to Hunt exactly how he can escape and clear his name. It’s a nice change to have a Secretary who actually credits Hunt with integrity and loyalty from the off, so of course he immediately has to die, leaving Hunt with another moving part – Jeremy Renner’s Agent Brandt. Introduced as a simple analyst, Brandt’s story evolves throughout the run time, providing one of the film’s few minor weak spots, as it insists, upon the big reveal between Hunt and Brandt at the close, that Hunt has known who Brandt was all along, which doesn’t quite chime with some of their earlier interactions. That notwithstanding, it’s a deep character who gets the layers of who he is peeled back slowly and satisfyingly as the film progresses. Brandt is a welcome addition to the crew.

Another minor quibble is the stunning but oddly over-complicated sequence set in the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Mindboggling as the stunt work involving Cruise climbing up the tower is, the whole scheme seems oddly overdone, as the team try to convince Hendricks and the deadly assassin Moreau that they have met with one another by staging the meetings with each using a decoy and switching around the floors of the hotel and doing complicated things with elevators. There’s some beautiful moments in it, not least Benji’s sterling turn as a bellhop using a false arm, but it just feels like complication for the sake of it – having seen the sequence where the plan is explained several times, I still struggle working out what the justification for this particular plan is, but it does play out a nice set of sequences. Unfortunately as it goes on, it seems less and less justified, as the plan goes through so many revisions, from feeding false information to giving the real information and then the bad guys both realising the ruse and all hell breaking loose. It’s arguable that it’s a good showcase of the old maxim about no plan surviving first contact with the enemy, but at the same time, it’s difficult not to feel all the complexity has been for naught when it’s over.

Nonetheless, the chase scene through the streets of Dubai in a sand storm is breathtaking indeed, Hunt rushing through a thick haze of dust as he pursues Hendricks, in a car and on foot. Somehow, despite the literal dust blindness created by the sandstorm, the director manages to always have us following the action, partly through clever use of a tracking McGuffin but mainly through simply having a keen eye for using motion and sound as much as actual pictures to convey what’s happening. The intensity of the scene is compounded by the lack of being able to see properly, but the narrative thread is never compromised – quite the feat indeed.

While Hunt is engaged in that chase, there’s the resolution of another running subplot in the background as Moreau ends up booted out of a 119th floor window by Carter in the course of defending herself from the assassin. It’s difficult not to feel that Bird gets to have his narrative cake and eat it with this one – neither we nor Brandt or Hunt can blame Carter for defending herself in the middle of a fight near an open window, but also Carter gets to have been the one who killed the woman who murdered her lover in cold blood at the start of the film. Whereas she shows every sign of genuine contrition for what was an unintentional killing, it’s difficult to imagine that she beats herself up too badly about it when we (and Hunt and Brandt) aren’t looking. Although it’s a cheat, it’s cleverly done, and difficult to begrudge.

Pulling another thread in, Hunt then meets with Bogdan, the very man he sprang from jail during his introductory sequence in the film where he batters his way through a prison full of guards and fellow inmates to break for freedom. The arms dealer Bogdan hooks Hunt up with is another classic character of the series – a shady individual whose loyalties are never quite clear to the audience until the film requires them to be.

And then the movie trots a bit further around the globe again, this time to India and the target of Hendricks’ plans, a decommissioned soviet weapons satellite bought by tycoon Brij Nath to use for his television station. It’s another of those staple heist scenes where the different team members do their thing working towards a common goal, Carter seducing Nath to get the codes they need to access the satellite, Brandt doing the physical job of accessing a server using some nifty magnets with Benji’s guidance and Hunt co-ordinating. It’s hard to feel like Anil Kapoor gets a fair crack of the whip here, such an established name playing little more than a stereotypical rich idiot, but he commits to the part with aplomb, and it works because of that commitment. The final confrontation between Hunt and Hendricks in an automatic car parking tower, with cars and the two fighters falling and bouncing around all over the place while on the other side of the world, a nuke has been launched from a Russian sub and is heading for the US, is possibly one notch too far on the overblown action belt, but then the movie itself seems to recognise this, not only having Ethan and the team stop the nuke exploding at the last possible second but also having Ethan furiously hitting the abort button yelling ‘Mission Accomplished!’ (which the team rib him about later). That’s the key difference here between this film and M:I-2 (which takes itself far too seriously from start to finish) and M:I III (which has moments of lightness but mainly relentless grim darkness): it is self-aware, and able to not only let the audience know that it gets the joke, but that it’s in on it as well.

The revelation at the end of Julia’s real fate (after many different speculations all round – they broke up, she’s dead and so on) is a nice capstone, and whereas some may dismiss it as sappy, for me it’s a sign that the series is finally truly comfortable in its wheelhouse. Unlike Nyah, who simply vanished after one film and was never heard from again, Julia is kept in the background, her importance to Hunt acknowledged without either beating the audience over the head with it or taking it down a more disposable route. It makes us feel like we are watching a genuinely connected set of stories, and a group of characters who grow over time, and that’s part of the unique charm of the franchise among its genre stablemates.

It borrows from what went before, and it does get a little silly, but it changes that familiar material in unexpected ways, it keeps the viewer engaged with several subplots and minor revelations along the way which are pitched perfectly so as not to detract from the main narrative and it is able to laugh at itself when appropriate, without taking the joke too far at any point. A few minor niggles aside, it’s certainly a ride well worth taking, and one of the strongest entries in an already decent franchise.