Who's in It: Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Billy Crudup, Ving Rhames, Laurence Fishburne, Keri Russell, Michelle Monaghan, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Maggie Q
The Basics: Tom Cruise takes time out of his busy schedule of being publicly weird to make a new "Please Love Tom Cruise Again, Right Now" promotional film. He runs and jumps and shoots people, and then stuff blows up around him. He makes that angry glare-face a lot, the one he's pretty good at in movies in which he has to run and jump and shoot people while stuff blows up around him.
What's the Deal? I love advance buzz. I live in Los Angeles, so I'm very familiar with it. People say stuff like, "Oh, wow, I hear this latest Mission: Impossible movie is the best one yet!" How they hear this, I don't know. Maybe Entertainment Tonight told them that. That's when I respond, "Oh, really? You mean Tom Cruise isn't going to be in it anymore?"
Why I Don't Like Tom Cruise, Just in Case You're Wondering: It's not because of Katie Holmes or his asinine opinionating about psychiatry or because I think he's a jerk. (Even though I do think he's a jerk.) It's because every movie he's in becomes about selling you Tom Cruise as a charismatic presence. It's like a big ego bomb went off all mushroom-cloudy.
What's Good About This Otherwise Dull Movie: Director J.J. Abrams did the best he could to inject some real-life humor into it, making Tom a flesh-and-blood human being with a wife (Monaghan) to care for, a human who has feelings for things that aren't just remote-controlled assassination devices. And Felicity's in it, and she's shooting a gun. That's kind of rad. Meanwhile, you have Hoffman elevating everything he touches by being the best kind of bad guy. He's not mustache-twirly evil or Hannibal Lecter cartoonish-lovable. He's deadpan-sadist evil with a touch of "Tom, you're kind of annoying me, too, and that's another reason I'm going to chop you into pieces now."
Directors I'd Like to See Get Hold of Cruise: Catherine Breillat, David Lynch, Gaspar Noé