MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 3

Tom Cruise’s puggish mug may be all over the poster for M:i:III (a title so thoroughly embedded in the cutesy sequel numbering tradition that we can assume the next stage is Morse Code), but the true star of the film is clearly director J.J. Abrams. His clever pastiche of the best moments from “Alias” is almost an after-thought compared to the salvage job he has done, taking a creative bathysphere down to the inky depths of PR, to try to raise the Titanic of Cruise’s popularity with the public.

It has already been remarked upon how Cruise’s fiancée in the movie (played by Michelle Monaghan) seems to be a thinly-disguised Katie Holmes, and Monaghan’s character gets the marriage ceremony so far denied the unwed mother of Suri. But there may be some darker overtones there: for instance, is the gaffer’s tape over Monaghan’s mouth during the hostage scenes a reference to Cruise’s Scientological dictate that there would be no screaming allowed during childbirth? (And after all the trouble I went to, to place that “curse” on Eve! Did L. Ron think apples grow on trees?) But I digress from the movie itself; if you want to read my celebrity profiles, you’ll just have to pay for that copy of Us magazine.

What spiritual dimension, you may ask, can be found in m:I:iii, amidst the stunts and CGI effects? Is it in the person of the bemused preacher in the hospital chapel, so used to delivering Last Rites, who may in fact be delivering the metaphorical Last Rites to Katie Holmes’ free will? Is it in the sheer weary evil of the villain – about whom we never know anything, including what evil thing he’s trying to accomplish – played by Philip Seymour Hoffman?

No, actually, I think the spiritual dimension of this movie is actually in the movie previews that precede it.  After the inevitable “Zoom Zoom Zoom” car commercial (which may one day convince God and I to bury the hatchet and start over on the universe), there follows a parade of coming attractions so mindless, so utterly detached from the reality of avian flu and melting glaciers and Darfur and high gas prices that it’s perfectly clear that we’re no longer in the mood for reality.  And I’m not talking about reality shows, so neatly edited as to create artificial crises and resolutions that they bring a tear even to my omniscient eye (hey, even Yahweh didn’t see that coming on American Idol), I’m talking about old-school, real reality, the kind that’s now being repackaged for our infotainment in “United 93” and “World Trade Center”, movies which have actually managed to put quotation marks around events we used to have real emotions about.

So the lesson here is: give up. Buy that big-screen TV. Sign up for TiVO and VOD and cable and satellite, stay in your homes, and just enter the brave new world of what I like to call “Passive Living”. After all, doesn’t it beat your life?