REVIEWED - MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III: This is a smashingly well-executed popcorn entertainment, writes Michael Dwyer

INAUGURATING the summer blockbuster season with a big bang, Mission: Impossible III raises the bar for all the mega-budget action extravaganzas to follow in the weeks ahead. JJ Abrams, making an auspicious cinema debut as director after his TV experience on Lost and Alias, was an inspired choice to helm this adrenalin-pumping adventure, which firmly eclipses its predecessors directed by Brian De Palma (1996) and John Woo (2000).

Abrams eschews the Bondian opening sequence that's regarded as de rigueur for the genre and immediately gets down to the essential business of heroes and villains, as glacially malevolent Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman) gives secret agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) a countdown to 10, during which he has to reveal the location of a rabbit's foot, or a trussed-up woman will die.

With a gaze that could be described euphemistically as baleful, and without a trace of knowing humour, Hoffman makes Davian a formidable nemesis: an unscrupulous, conscience-free black market trader in weapons and information, regardless of the human consequences.

Abrams surrounds Hunt and Davian with a strong international cast playing characters that are unusually well developed for a franchise adventure.

Ving Rhames returns as Hunt's confidante, computers expert Luther Stickell, joined by team newcomers Maggie Q as cool, resourceful operative Zhen and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Irish ace pilot and driver Declan Gormley.

Back at Impossible Mission Force headquarters in Virginia are Simon Pegg as an Oxford graduate and technology wizard, Billy Crudup as the division head who gets to offer Hunt his new mission, should he choose to accept it, and Laurence Fishburne as the organisation's hyper-critical sourpuss supremo.

Completing the principal cast are Keri Russell as a Hunt protege who gets seriously imperilled, and Michelle Monaghan as the doctor who gets engaged to Hunt, naively believing that he works in traffic planning.

The set-pieces are spectacular, as they need to be, and orchestrated with remarkable cinematic flair and exemplary stunt work as the globetrotting movie hops from a factory siege in Berlin to an infiltration of the Vatican (for which a palazzo in Naples provides the interiors) to a thrilling extended chase sequence in nocturnal Shanghai, and back home to Virginia for an explosive confrontation along the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

Crucially, the movie gets its priorities right, in that its profusion of special effects are there to serve the narrative, rather than the other way round. Abrams propels the action at such an accelerated pace that there's barely time to draw breath or ponder on whether or not the afore-mentioned rabbit's foot might be a McGuffin - or even to be distracted by memories of Cruise's over-exposed media hoopla.