Mission: Impossible III was enjoyable from the first frame, a non-stop, blistering, well-executed action movie that gave me everything I'd hoped for and not a drop more. Directed by J.J. Abrams, of "Lost" and "Alias," the film elevated the franchise above John Woo's vision of ridiculous wire-fu amid doves and flames, harkening back to the Brian De Palma-helmed feature from 1996. In Abrams' film, IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) finally gets to use a team. In the first film, his teammates were assassinated in the opening sequence by the now-evil Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), and aside from the asinine move of eliminating Phelps, who could have played a major role in the films, we also lost out on seeing Ethan and his fellow agents function together on multiple missions. And the second film was just plain bad, nothing but Ethan and motorcycle tricks. I'm still annoyed that, in his final showdown with the villian in Mission: Impossible II, Ethan throws down his gun and opts to take out the bad guy using Guile's flash kick instead of just shooting the guy. Stupid.

But Abrams' film is a welcome return to form, and for "Alias" fans like myself, it's a comfortably familiar film. In the film's opening action setpiece, Ethan rescues kidnapped agent Lindsey Ferris (Keri Russell), and to get her up and running, he injects adrenaline directly into her heart. Roger Ebert thinks that Abrams is ripping off Tarantino, but (1) that's impossible, since that would mean ripping off a rip-off, and that much generational loss means it's basically fair game, since an act's appearance in a Tarantino film is its official coronation as a cliche, and (2) Abrams already used the scene on "Alias," when Sydney rescues Vaughn from K-Directorate at the beginning of Season 2 after he's been poisoned by the giant floating red ball of Rambaldi water and left behind while Sydney was briefly captured and tortured by her thought-to-be-dead-KGB-spy mother (it makes sense in context).

So when Ethan shot Lindsey's heart full of adrenaline, I wasn't thinking of Tarantino, but of how Abrams is smart enough to recycle his best tricks. And then there's Ethan's Shanghai hideout, Apt. 1406 in a run-down old building. Combining two digits and rearranging the rest makes 47, a number that figures prominently and often arbitrarily into the world of "Alias." But far from thinking Abrams a hack, I was pleased to see the arcane in-joke. Then again, I'm a geek like that. There's also an ops tech character played by Simon Pegg that's clearly modeled after Marshall Flenkman on "Alias." And Ethan spends the film in pursuit of the Rabbit's Foot, another generic but motivating MacGuffin, like the dozens that have formed the basis for various "Alias" episodes.

It's true that when TV directors make the jump to the big screen, they can often bring with them too many of the stylistic nuances of their TV shows, thus unfortunately limiting the film's broader appeal. However, Abrams manages to balance his old stuff with the new pretty well. The film's climactic battle manages to honor both, as Ethan once again takes on the bad guy, but his wife (Michelle Monaghan) does her share of damage by emptying clips into various henchmen. Abrams has come full circle, since "Alias" was born out of his musings about what would happen if Felicity were recruited by the CIA. Who else could save the day for Abrams but the girl with the gun?