Mission: Impossible III, by the NYTimes (sorry Eric, but this shit is funny).
IT would be a stretch to say that Tom Cruise needs a hit. What this guy needs is an intervention, someone who can help the star once known as Tom Terrific return to the glory days, when the only things most of us really knew about him came from the boilerplate continually recycled in glossy magazines, sealing him in a bubble of blandness and mystery. In those days, we didn't know that inside the world's biggest movie draw lurked a reckless couch-jumper and heartless amateur pharmacologist. All we saw was a billion-dollar smile and a performer who risked life and limb, everything but his own true self, for our movie-going pleasure. Until the ascendancy of George Clooney, the multi-hyphenated sex bomb (he walks, he talks, he smiles and he thinks!), few stars seemed to work harder than Mr. Cruise. The embodiment of the 1990's extreme ethos, he could be counted on to hang tougher than anyone else, whether doing his own stunts, spending a couple of years in production with Stanley Kubrick, or, as he did on more than one occasion, rescuing a civilian. Recently, though, all that extremeness has seemed, well, too extreme. And you have to wonder if the real mission in his newest film isn't the search for the damsel in distress or the hunt for the supervillain, but the resurrection of a screen attraction who has, of late, seemed a bit of a freak.
Aptly named or not, "Mission: Impossible III" may emerge as Mr. Cruise's latest box-office triumph, but it won't do him any favors when it comes to his public persona, since it appears to have been explicitly tailored to reflect his personal life, or at least its outward face. Much like the man playing him, Ethan works only if you don't know anything about what makes him tick. Once upon a Hollywood time, the studios carefully protected their stars from the press and the public. Now the impossible mission, it seems, is protecting them from themselves.
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