Here’s the problem: your megamillion dollar blockbusting movie franchise has hit the skids. Your director has quit, your script is in flux, and your superstar leading man is getting mangled by the media on a daily basis. Your budget is north of $200 million and exasperated studio honchos are threatening to pull the plug. What do you do? Easy. You hand the whole thing over to a New Yorker with some modestly successful screenwriting credits, no movie-directing experience, and a Zeitgeist-defining TV series under his belt. Enter J. J. Abrams, rising tyro director of Mission: Impossible III.

It is something of an understatement to say that the eyes of the movie industry are on the 39-year-old Abrams. The director, a veritable small-screen demigod who created the smash hits Alias and Lost, has boarded the good ship Mission: Impossible at an unusually sensitive time. The project itself was shunted about from the likes of David Fincher (Seven) to Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption), while its star Tom Cruise suffered a lengthy negative publicity implosion (sofa-abuse on Oprah, etc).

In the meantime the wider blockbuster culture, after last year’s summer-long boxoffice slump, is no longer defined by easy returns and monstrous opening weekends.

And yet, if Abrams today is feeling the strain of trailblazing this summer’s blockbuster season, he’s not showing it. Affable and intense, tucked away in a corner suite of the Dorchester hotel behind a phalanx of water bottles, the father of three claims to be unmoved by the mandatory evils of the entertainment industry. “I’m so used to the pressures of television, budget, story and deadline,” he says. “All this kind of scrutiny feels very familiar to me.”

Abrams says that his Mission: Impossible experience was, simply, fun. And that being “the TV guy” was not a hindrance to the process. On the contrary, he says, in telling the story of Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his elaborate globe-spanning search for the amoral arms dealer Owen Davian, played by the Oscar-winning Philip Seymour Hoffman, Abrams directly channelled his TV-based methodology into the movie’s structure. “In TV there’s always this awareness that you’ve got to keep the audience watching so that they don’t change channels. With this movie there’s a keen sense, from the opening scene, of: ‘Keep watching, keep watching!’ ” True, this is certainly the most wilfully frenetic of the Mission: Impossible movies. Gone are the oblique conversational digressions of the Brian De Palma original, or the devilishly long and stylish slow-motion sequences of John Woo’s sequel. Here they are replaced with a gamely helter-skelter narrative that’s packed to bursting with incident, where scenes and sequences tumble into each other as the movie races from shootout in Germany to kidnap in Rome to firefight in Florida and beyond.

Furthermore, Abrams handles the now delicate status of his leading man — who on Tuesday night spent four hours glad-handing fans at the movie’s UK premiere, despite having a newborn back at home — with aplomb. He simultaneously acknowledges Cruise’s iconic brand positioning and his recent more fallible reputation by placing him in a show-stopping opener (a harsh torture scene) that’s both painfully intimate and dramatically explosive. “I said to Tom from the start: ‘This movie needs to be successful despite you!’ “You hear about him, and you read about him, and you see him on the news, and he becomes this kind of objectified character. But the truth is that he is such a fine actor and so effective that he just kind of sucks you in.

“I wanted to throw the audience off balance from that opening scene, to acknowledge Cruise’s charisma, and then to say: ‘OK, this is who he is, now let’s get on with our lives.’ ”

And yet for all its vaunted storytelling élan, and its concurrent sense of solid character (Cruise has a back-story now, including a family car, a dog and a wife, played by Michelle Monaghan), there is something mysteriously absent from Mission: Impossible III. Call it a coherent formal purpose, or a unifying spirit even. Call it style, perhaps.

“I never tried to approach this in terms of style,” confesses Abrams, with remarkable candour. “I was always aware that I was following in the steps of two of the most stylised directors in De Palma and Woo. And I thought: ‘Who am I kidding? I have no sense of style. Well, none that I can think of.’

“So, really, I just tried to approach the movie from a story point of view.”

Story, of course, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. And without a directorial imprimatur to bind it, the film often feels exposed, perfunctory even, like a bigbudget TV show. And still, like Alias and Lost, it works on its own terms (Abrams is far too smart to fail).

It delivers enough narrative punch to guarantee huge success for the franchise and for Abrams’s future career. And certainly in the risk-averse blockbuster climate it would seem that the future is truly bright for directors with safe hands rather than iconoclastic tendencies (this summer’s two other biggies, The Da Vinci Code and X-Men 3 were directed by the journeymen Ron Howard and Brett Ratner).

Abrams, meanwhile, is turning his attentions to another TV-to-movie franchise in need of serious salvation — the Star Trek series. A “Spock and Kirk: the early years” plot is rumoured, but Abrams is staying tight-lipped. “We have a take that I think would be very interesting,” he says, guardedly. “I grew up with the show and it feels like a good time to take another look at it. There’s an opportunity to do something you haven’t seen before that could be very exciting.” And no doubt it will.

Mission: Impossible III opens on May 4

J.J. Abrams — mission directorial

- Born Jeffrey Jacob Abrams in New York, on June 27, 1966.
- Started shooting 8mm films at the age of 8.
- Wrote screenplays for Regarding Henry, Forever Young and Armageddon, before creating the hit TV series Felicity. Alias and Lost followed.
- In 2004 he met Tom Cruise and handed him a DVD box set of Alias.
On July 12, 2005, began filming Mission: Impossible III.

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