But it cannot last. One of his IMF teammates, Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames: Dawn of the Dead, Dark Blue), says flat out: “A normal relationship isn’t possible for people like us,” what with their “baggage” and their “lifestyle.” Julia knows something is up, too: “Tell me it’s real,” she pleads of him, “I mean us,” when she begins to sense that he’s not, ahem, being straight with her. But he continues to fake it -- whether he actually loves her or not, he definitely loves the idea of her -- and finds himself in a mad race literally around the globe to maintain the farce when Julia’s life is threatened by a villain who knows he can use her to get to Ethan.

And who is that enemy? Why, it would be someone like Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote, Along Came Polly) and his arms dealer Owen Davian, wouldn’t it? Like a smack in the face, like a taunt, like a ghost of Christmases that might have been, here is someone not celebritified and tabloidized, someone who clearly feels no need to shout from mountaintops how in love he is as if he had to justify himself, someone with a shiny new Oscar, someone not movie-star-plastic but handsome in a down-to-earth way... someone who’s a Real Actor. Which, questions of talent aside, Cruise is not -- he’s a Movie Star. (Hoffman, by the way, is a hoot here, all smarm and biting, juicy nastiness.) Cruise might have gone the character-actor route -- Collateral proved he has the goods -- but he chose the other path. Or perhaps had that mantle of Hollywood responsibility thrust upon him in the great hour of need that was Risky Business, and accepted the burden for the good of us all. Either way, he’s stuck with it now, and that’s fine... except, geez, it’d be nice to kick back with a beer on the just-mowed lawn once in a while, maybe wave to the neighbors.

Look, I realize that it can be hard to distinguish from dry snark, but I swear to god I am being 100 percent totally and sincerely sincere when I implore you to feel Tom’s pain. Maybe. Clearly, the boy ain’t right: he’s either, like Troy McClure, more into fish than people, or there really is a 70-million-year-old alien inhabiting his body, and yet he still feels compelled to attempt to pass for human instead of just saying, Fuck you all, this is who I am. Or else the entire phenomenon that is Tom Cruise is just one giant work of performance art and he’s giggling at us as much as we’re giggling at him, and that would be weird, too.

But the impossible mission here is to watch Mission: Impossible III and not see very distinct parallels to the public spectacle that Cruise has become. Because he is not a Real Actor, he doesn’t disappear into a role -- the role becomes him, and lately, he’s Tom Cruiser than ever. And because this is not merely a dumb action movie -- J.J. Abrams brings a lot of the same literary smarts that imbue his Lost and Alias, and there is much that is clever and witty, visually as well as verbally, here -- it’s hard not to see some of these parallels as deliberate. This is a deeply cynical film in a lot of ways, bitter about the wages of dedication and the pressures of conformity (one character speculates that the MacGuffin everyone is after is a superweapon that would render all uniqueness out of the whole world, boil it down into a featureless goo). And if it is indeed yet one more outward expression of Cruise’s inner turmoil, might its assured blockbuster success be a kind of self-flagellation?

Pity poor Tom Cruise.