In the mid-2000s, JJ Abrams was a hard-working television writer, producer and director with hit shows like Felicity (1998-2002), Alias (2001-2006) and Lost (2004-2010) under his belt but he was yet to make his debut as a big screen director. He’d written several films, including Michael Bay’s disaster film Armageddon (1998) and John Dahl’s horror film Joy Ride (2001) but he’d been too busy with his television work to really contemplate a career as a film director.

While Abrams was hard at work on his various projects, Tom Cruise was having problems getting his third Mission: Impossible film off the ground. Mission: Impossible II (2000) had been a hit but trouble stalked Mission: Impossible III from the start – directors David Fincher and Joe Carnahan came and went as did co-stars Kenneth Branagh, Carrie-Anne Moss and Scarlett Johansson as pre-production rumbled on. Having binged the first two series of Alias, about a female CIA agent (Jennifer Garner) who also works for a secret counter-espionage agency known as SD-6 hoping to bring it down from within, all the while adopting a series of aliases. Cruise was intrigued and, despite Abrams having no experience of directing for the big screen, let alone a successful and action-heavy franchise like Mission: Impossible, offered him the job.

Unusually, the film opens with what we will later learn is a flash-forward to events from much in the film. It’s a disorientating opening in which arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman) questions a captured Ethan Hunt (Cruise) about the whereabouts of something called The Rabbit’s Foot while holding a woman hostage. Reference is made to things that we haven’t see yet which wrong foots us from the start though it all seems unnecessarily confusing.

The main plot picks up with Hunt retired from fieldwork and content to train new agents while starting a new life with his fiancée, Julia Meade (Michelle Monaghan). He’s pulled back into the world of IMF missions when he’s asked by Assistant Director of Operations John Musgrave (Billy Crudup) to help on rescue one of Hunt’s protégés, Lindsey Farris (Keri Russell) who has been taken captive by arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Hunt is persuaded to take on one last mission and is assigned a new team – Declan Gormley (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), Zhen Lei (Maggie Q), and his old friend Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames). They rescue Lindsey but Davian has implanted explosives in her head that kills her as they flee, earning the ire of IMF Director Theodore Brassel (Laurence Fishburne). IMF technician Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) recovers data from a pair of recovered laptops that refer to the mysterious Rabbit’s Foot (we never do find out what it actually is) and the team abduct Davian from a function at the Vatican City. Hunt is given cause to believe that Brassel is a traitor, Davian is freed by mercenaries who attack the convoy he’s travelling in, Julia is kidnapped and yet again Hunt is betrayed by the IMF. Can he expose the mole in the organisation, free Julia and prevent Davian from getting his hands on The Rabbit’s Foot – whatever it might be?

The transformation of the Mission: Impossible franchise into a star vehicle for Cruise is pretty much complete by this stage. There’s still an IMF team to assist him on his mission but they’re very much playing second fiddle to Cruise. Simon Pegg makes his debut as new series regular Benji though doesn’t get a great deal to do – he’s more proactive in later films – and Michelle Monahan makes the most substantial of three appearances in the franchise as Cruise’s love-interest and later wife. Hoffman is a far more substantial villain than Scott in Mission: Impossible II, Fishburne is one of the better IMF directors and Crudup, Q, Russell and Rhys Meyers make up the numbers as IMF agents.

But as ever, it’s the action sequences that are the main draw here and once again they’re state-of-the art, featuring a first-rate helicopter chase a giant wind farm, an elaborate set-piece in Vatican City and one of the series highlights, the attack on the convoy transporting Davian as it crosses the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. For sheer invigorating absurdity, there’s little in the whole franchise that comes close to the sight of Tom Cruise sliding down the outside of a Shanghai skyscraper – though the idea that late in the day, hospital doctor Julia can suddenly become a highly accurate markswoman with only Hunt’s garbled tuition is pretty laughable.

The quiet moments have an unexpected domestic flavour to them as the battered and bruised (psychologically as well as physically) returns home to Julia between exhausting missions. There are all the gadgets and gizmos you’d expect (it’s the most Bond-like film of the series so far), including Hunt once again abseiling to within an inch of the round – that and high-speed motorcycle chases were to become something of a cliché in the series – and we get to see the mask-making technology in action for the first time.

The script, co-written by Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci who would team up again later for the television series Fringe (2008-2013) and the revitalised Star Trek big screen franchise starting in 2009, has a few welcome flourishes that may not be immediately clear, but which at least suggest that they had their minds on loftier things. At one point Brassel cites The Invisible Man, noting “Wells, not Ellison,” a reference to H.G. Wells and Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man. Otherwise it brings nothing new to the franchise, but what it does bring, it brings in considerable style and it consolidates everything that had gone before. It once again deploys that most overworked on Mission: Impossible tropes, Hunt being betrayed by IMF and going rogue to clear his name. You have to wonder quite why he stays with them when the repeatedly treat him so shabbily…

Mission: Impossible III was released in the wake of Cruise’s bizarre antics on Oprah Winfrey’s show (he bounced around on the sofa declaring his love for new girlfriend, actress Katie Holmes) that could have short-circuited his career. But Cruise survived both it and accusations that he’d pressured Paramount, producers of the Mission: Impossible films, into pulling from circulation an episode of South Park that was critical of Scientology and questioning of his sexuality and the film and was another hit, albeit not on the same scale as the second Mission. But the public loved the new Mission: Impossible and it certainly wasn’t going anywhere though it was in for an overhaul. After three entirely unconnected adventures, the series was about to get a “soft reboot” and embark on a series of more serial like films.