After three unconnected outings, the Mission: Impossible franchise underwent something a “soft reboot” with the fourth instalment, featuring more returning characters (the ever-present Tom Cruise and Ving Rhames were joined by Simon Pegg and, very briefly, Michelle Monahan) and in the closing seconds exposing a thread that would be explored at greater length in at least the next two films. To oversee this new start, Cruise again made another unusual choice, calling on animator Brad Bird (he of The Iron Giant (1999), The Incredibles (2004) and Ratatouille (2007) fame) to sit in the director’s chair and make his first live-action film (he later directed Tomorrowland (2015) before heading back to animation for The Incredibles 2 (2018). The gamble paid off handsomely with the best film in the series so far.

IMF agent Trevor Hanaway (Josh Holloway) is murdered in Budapest by assassin Sabine Moreau (Léa Seydoux), who makes off with the Russian nuclear launch codes he was carrying, planning to sell them on to a man known only as “Cobalt”. Meanwhile, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has to broken out of a Russian prison where he’s deliberately incarcerated himself hoping to get close to one of Cobalt’s contacts. He’s helped to escape by Hanaway’s colleague Jane Carter (Paula Patton) and field agent Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), Hunt and his contact, Bogdan (Miraj Grbic) get away and the IMF sends him and Dunn to infiltrate the Kremlin in search of clues. The operation ends in chaos when the Kremlin is destroyed in a massive explosion and the IMFG are blamed. With the IMF Secretary (an uncredited Tom Wilkinson) dead and the entire organisation shut down – the “Ghost Protocol” of the title – Hunt, Carter, Dunn and IMF pencil-pusher William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) are left to their own devices as they continue their search for Cobalt. They end up in Dubai where Moreau is due to meet Cobalt, identified as nuclear strategist Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist) who is looking to start a nuclear war between the US and Russia, and where Hunt ends up crawling around the outside of the colossal Burj Khalifa; they lose Hendricks in a sand storm; travel to Mumbai where Hendricks is trying to set up a deal to access a satellite owned by billionaire entrepreneur Brij Nath (Anil Kapoor); and Hunt tracks Hendricks to an automated car park for a brutal final standoff.

There’s more emphasis on teamwork this time with less of Hunt acting alone. He still takes on most of the heavy lifting – that justly famous Burj Khalifa sequence is positively hair-raising – but he’s far more dependent on the other agents than he and been in any of the other films. But as he’s required to use more gizmos this time that’s probably no surprise – he needed people on hand to help him operate a lot of it. The gadgetry has a more science fictiony feel to them again, with contact lenses that track faces in crowds, a high-tech supercar, a hologram screen, balloon mounted bombs and of course the mask making devices. There are even magnetic undergarments that actually have a purpose in the plot. But there’s also a very funny running gag about how the technology keeps failing, always at the most inopportune moments (like the electro-magnetic “sucker” gloves, one of which decides to stop working only when Hunt is far enough away from the open window and stranded on the side of the Burk Khalifa). With no-one to turn to, the team have to use whatever equipment they can scavenge and they seem to have found possibly the least efficient cache of goodies known to the IMF.

Like all of the Mission: Impossible films, there are no nuances, meaningful political agenda or profound psychological insights here – it’s just old-fashioned spectacle, the most fun of the series, the one with the most self-reflexive gags. Screenwriters Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec know better than anyone that this is all completely absurd and just urge you to buy into it and enjoy the ride. The Mission: Impossible films had rarely given much credence to notions of restraint or verisimilitude (or even the laws of physics) and now what few traces there were are thrown to the wind – from this point on the films get sillier and as a consequence, they become even more fun than they were before.

There had been some talk in earlier publicity of Cruise’s determination to do as many of his own stunts as he could get away with, but it was his daredevil antics hanging off the side of Burj Khalifa – that really is him clambering around the outside of the world’s tallest building though not, it should go without saying, clinging to the glass by finger-tip suckers. He was well restrained and harnessed but even so, one of the world’s highest paid actors was exposed to the elements, 2000 feet off the ground – the insurance bills must have been astronomical.

Ghost Protocol shares a problem with many of the post-Roger Moore Bond films in that the villain is a little underwhelming. Hendricks is a one-dimensional bad guy even by the usual standards of the Mission: Impossible films. Nyqvist does what he can but the character is so thinly written that he’s forgotten about as soon as the end credits start to role. Elsewhere, Jeremy Renner is very good as spare wheel Brandt, Paula Patton makes little impression in her one-and-done IMF outing and Léa Seydoux is criminally underused. Rhames and Monahan turn up at the last minute for uncredited cameos that add very little to the story at all.

At the very last moment, Hunt, having barely recovered from his last mission, receives his next one and reference is made to The Syndicate. In the television series, The Syndicate was a codenamed for the mafia which the IMF occasionally did battle with. Here, they turn out to be something very different but it’ still a nice tip of the hat to the franchise’s roots.

Ghost Protocol became the second highest grossing film in the franchise thus far, helping the series to bounce back from the disappointing box office of Mission: Impossible III. It established a new road for the series to travel and upped the already impressive action ante to greater extremes – the destruction of the Kremlin is truly spectacular. It helped to keep the franchise rolling along, bringing a fresh perspective to the series that would be built on successfully in the next two films.