Directed by Brad Bird. Starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton, Michael Nyqvist, Vladimir Mashkov, Léa Seydoux, Tom Wilkinson, Ving Rhames 12A cert, general release, 132 min

Tom Cruise and his posse lighten up in the fourth Mission: Impossible, writes TARA BRADY

WE'VE BECOME accustomed to seeing Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt piggybacking on fast-moving trains, clinging to the sides of getaway cars and using bomb blasts to provide enough force for a handy shortcut. But the fourth and best film from the admirably erratic Mission: Impossiblefranchise sees the embattled operative hitch a ride on the friend ship, the one vessel he has neither hijacked nor blown up in previous instalments. Bless.

Brad Bird, the director of The Incredibles, Ratatouilleand the sublime Iron Giant, brings a cartoonish sensibility and a semblance of narrative coherence to the franchise that once defined the Whole Bunch of Stuff Happens subgenre. True, in Mission: Impossible 4, as they're not calling it, a whole bunch of stuff does indeed happen. But where previous instalments dangled A-listers only to kill them off one chase scene later, or left the viewer wondering if this was an entirely new car chase or merely an extension of the one that went before, Ghost Protocol is happy to make more time for people and action movie quips.

Ethan Hunt is back and this time he’s hanging with the Red Hand Gang, featuring foxy intelligence op Paula Patton, Simon Pegg (who steals the picture) as the funny tech guy and Jeremy Renner as the mysterious one who you’re not really sure what his deal is.

The posse lends a pleasing Boy's Ownadventure aura to the project as they zigzag across continents on the tail of a megalomaniac physicist turned doomsday merchant (Michael Nyqvist from the original The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo). Look out. He's wearing a white suit.

Still, Tom Cruise didn’t get to be Tom Cruise by sharing screen time. The best moments of the film involve the star scaling the glass walls of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Cruise’s vertiginous daredevilry has seen the film break IMAX records in the US, and it deserves as much.

At the other end of the spectrum there are winningly lo-fi moments: a phone booth implodes in a wisp of powder smoke. Cruise walks into the Kremlin courtesy of a fake moustache. One of the set pieces requires Cruise and Pegg to channel Tommy Cooper as scenery movers.

At 132 minutes it’s preposterously overextended, but at least 90 of them deliver handsomely.

* Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocolopens on Monday.