It’s been nearly a year since the release of the final (at least for now) Mission: Impossible movie, which means that movie nerds have taken a long, much-needed break from their favorite hobby: rewatching and ranking the Mission: Impossible movies. The majority of those rankings have one thing in common: Mission: Impossible III comes in either dead last or, at best, in the bottom tier, depending on one’s tolerance for Tom Cruise hubris in its John Woo-assisted relative youth or Christopher McQuarrie-abetted late middle age. But is its middling reputation really deserved?

The third Mission: Impossible movie, which just celebrated its 20th anniversary with very little fanfare, has the unusual distinction of having saved and seemingly doomed the series in equal measure. That it existed at all represented a major salvage from first-time director J.J. Abrams. Granted, Mission: Impossible II didn’t seem like a movie that should have necessitated any franchise rescuing; the 2000 sequel outgrossed the 1996 original to become one of Cruise’s biggest hits ever, assuring the arrival of a third installment at a time when sequels were somewhat less obligatory than they are now. But a third Mission proved surprisingly difficult to launch. David Fincher was hired, targeting a reasonable 2004 debut, but the all-important, never-specified “creative differences” led to him departing the project in favor of, hey, making the stone-cold masterpiece Zodiac, so that was probably the right call.

Fincher’s replacement was Joe Carnahan, whose then-recent Narc had been produced and championed by Cruise. This iteration of the movie got further; Carrie-Anne Moss, Scarlett Johansson, and Kenneth Branagh were supposedly in the cast. But then those pesky “creative differences” reappeared, and Carnahan was out. Cruise, meanwhile, had caught up with DVDs of the TV series Alias, and offered creator J.J. Abrams the job. He agreed, but this further delayed production because of his commitments to Alias and a nascent series called Lost.

When cameras did roll, though, production was executed with IMF-style efficiency: The movie was shot in the summer of 2005 and played in theaters as the summer kickoff movie the following May. It wasn’t quite the whirlwind of War of the Worlds, which also pushed Mission back a little further and which finished principal photography a mere four months before its summer ’05 release, but it still required a major sprint from its star, perhaps the sprintingest man in show business.

War of the Worlds would also impact the Mission: Impossible III in other, less expected, less athletic ways. During the promotion of that Spielberg sci-fi picture, just as Mission filming was about to kick off, Cruise went on a talk show bad-will tour, where he introduced a few additional promotional partners: His relationship with Katie Holmes, and Scientology. For the first time, his tightly controlled public persona started to seem pretty unhinged, and while War of the Worlds was his biggest hit since Mission: Impossible II, it was speculated that Mission: Impossible III, which opened well after any shifted perceptions about Cruise had a chance to sink in, suffered the brunt of the bad press instead. As far as summer kickoffs go, it was outperformed by then-recent superhero benchmarks like Spider-Man and X2; for that matter, it also didn’t match the opening weekends of The Mummy Returns or Van Helsing. It would prove to be the last non-superhero first-weekend-in-May movie until a global pandemic eliminated that slot entirely for a couple of years. Unlike some of the later installments, Mission: Impossible III didn’t hold up especially well, either, and finished with a decent but ultimately underwhelming domestic box office performance, still the lowest of the now-eight movies. It took another five and a half years for Ghost Protocol to come out, and at the time it was thought that Paramount might be attempting to reorient the series away from Cruise. Instead, MI:4 was an unusually beloved smash and assured future movies.

Yet before that new high-water mark, the previous critical and audience reaction peak was technically… Mission: Impossible III! Even with retrospective reviews that should theoretically benefit the well-regarded first installment, the third movie has the highest Rotten Tomatoes average of the first three. (It can’t really compete with anything that came after, as affection for the series grew amidst a number of high points; even the somewhat maligned Final Reckoning scored a bit higher.) It also received an “A-“ CinemaScore from opening-night audiences – higher than either of its predecessors.

These are imperfect measures, to be sure, but they also reflect a movie that does go about the business of a franchise spy movie with a combination of Cruise’s relentless focus and Abrams’ instincts for immediate crowdpleasing. It’s hard to overstate the relief that was expressed, from both critics and fans, about the degree to which Abrams successfully reoriented the third film back into an actual Impossible Missions Force team, something that was barely there in the skeleton crew of the John Woo movie. Most consequently, the film introduces Simon Pegg’s Benji, who would become a fixture for the remainder of the films alongside Luther (Ving Rhames). The rest of the MI3 team, including Maggie Q and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, were one-and-done, but they reinforce the Abrams talent for ensemble casting; Maggie Q in particular really should have popped up in a later installment.

Abrams also corralled the most memorable villain of the series, Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a terrorist in search of the “Rabbit’s Foot,” a classic Abrams MacGuffin whose bio-hazard specifics are never elaborated upon… at least in this movie. (More on that in a moment.) Matching the MacGuffin’s plot-engine status, Hoffman’s Davian is compellingly opaque; he has the chilly fury and cruelty of someone seeking revenge, yet lacks any particular connection to Cruise’s Ethan Hunt beyond the one he forges by kidnapping Hunt’s wife Julia (Michelle Monghan). The lack of traditional motivation makes him weirdly scary and unpredictable.

It could also be read as a classic J.J. Abrams hedge – an excuse to start with a grabby in-media-res flash-forward (to a late-movie scene where Davian holds a gun to Julia’s head as Ethan begs for her life) and hook audiences without any idea of how to further pay anything off. (Davian’s demise, on that level, is particularly ignominious.) That’s arguably part of the Abrams style: Richly colorful and flashily textured, like a nerdier Michael Bay, with a preference for glossing over plot details over sacrificing any momentum. At the time, Abrams probably felt like an auteur downgrade after Brian De Palma and John Woo: a TV guy promoted to showrun a blockbuster film series. 20 years later, though – and following four Christopher McQuarrie versions of Mission: Impossible in a row – Abrams feels as distinctive as any of the films’ other directors, even if he’s not as respected as someone like De Palma. He would go on to do the same kind of franchise-rescue jobs on Star Trek and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and see his bluff called when rehired to bring that new Star Wars trilogy home, resulting in a huge creative miss.

In the meanwhile, last year’s final Mission unexpected called back to the third movie in particular, by claiming that the Rabbit’s Foot was an early ancestor of the Entity, the evil artificial intelligence code that threatens the world in the last two films. It was both a nice tribute to an oft-overlooked installment and maybe a little misguided in its attempt to tie the movies together in closer continuity, when so much of their pleasures (especially through the first five films) come from the switching up of directors, approaches, styles, and team members. Mission: Impossible III doesn’t need your pity! It has a sequence where Ethan and his team break into the Vatican! There’s another bit where one of Hunt’s trademark break-ins is kept largely offscreen until such time as he must float/plummet down from a Shanghai skyscraper onto a moving vehicle! Abrams unleashes an extra-long take just to capture the full glory of Cruise’s climactic running! The Abrams film may have threatened to pull Mission: Impossible back down to Earth, which only boomeranged back into increasingly messianic treatment of Cruise in later films. But in the moment, it’s impossible to resist.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream Mission: Impossible III on Paramount+