Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol is something of a throwback. In an age where most spy movies take their cue from the gritty Bourne series or Daniel Craig's brooding, cold-blooded take on James Bond, Ghost Protocol dares to be gleefully unrealistic and, most importantly, fun. Director Brad Bird has made a movie that injects some much-needed levity into the genre while putting his considerable skills in directing action films to good use in what might be one of the most purely entertaining movies of the season.

It's been about six years since the spies of the IMF (that's Impossible Mission Force) have been on the big screen, and things have gone a bit downhill for them in the interim. For one thing, Tom Cruise's character, Ethan Hunt, has been spending most of that time in a Moscow prison, and for another, an IMF agent holding nuclear launch codes has just been killed by a mercenary in Budapest, Hungary. But a new team of agents, including actor Simon Pegg as tech man Benji Dunn, have arrived to bust Hunt out of prison and find the stolen codes, which have fallen into the hands of a rogue nuclear physicist known only as Cobalt. Things take another turn for the worse when, while trying to retrieve information on Cobalt from the Kremlin, a bomb is set off, devastating Red Square and implicating Hunt and, by extension, the U.S. government.

After that, the government enacts the titular "Ghost Protocol," officially dissolving the IMF and leaving Hunt and his team to track down Cobalt and clear their names before he starts a nuclear war. Joined by IMFs senior analyst William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) and agent Jane Carter (Paula Patton), whose boyfriend happened to be the agent killed in Budapest, Hunt's team will have to go from Moscow to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and finally Mumbai, India, to hunt down Cobalt and stop a nuclear war.

The movie is fairly long—over two hours—but it never drags, thanks in no small part to Bird's talent for shooting action scenes. Until this film, Bird has worked exclusively in animation, with beloved hits like The Iron Giant and The Incredibles under his belt, and he's lost none of what made those movies so great in the transition to live action. Just like in The Incredibles, he's found a way to balance seriousness and fun: keeping things entertaining while never losing sight of the stakes. He's made a movie with properly despicable villains and truly likeable heroes and then lets them fight things out all over the globe.

This is, first and foremost, a movie about Ethan Hunt and the people of the Impossible Mission Force doing, well, impossible things. From Cruise having to fight his way out of a Russian prison in the opening scenes to the end sequence in a multi-story Mumbai parking garage, Bird lets his creativity run free while never becoming over indulgent.

With that in mind, the cast has to be given credit as well. Cruise has become something of a punchline ever since he decided Oprah's couch was the perfect place to declare his love for Katie Holmes. Indeed, his best-received role since then has been the (admittedly hilarious) gag-character Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder, with not much else to show besides a string of flops like Knight and Day. After all that, it's kind of nice to see Cruise going back to his leading-man roots, and that, despite all the real-life weirdness, he can still be affable and funny enough to anchor a movie. The other standout here is Pegg, playing the nervous, wide-eyed techie who's on his very first field mission.

Bird and his team know that people want to see amazing gadgets and incredible stunts from their Mission: Impossible movies and were only happy to oblige. Watching it, you get the feeling that everything truly fell into the right place: Cruise is charming, Pegg is funny, the action is tight and the story is interesting. Bird has made what could very well be the definitive Mission: Impossible movie. Not bad for a guy who's never done live-action before.