The throbbing Lalo Schifrin theme music from the original late-Sixties TV show is still the best thing about this third mission, as it was about the first two. It's hard to decide what's the worst thing. Tom Cruise would be a too-easy fall guy. Granted, he seems to be getting worse and worse as an actor. (His brief disguise as a Czech citizen at the airport bears a striking resemblance to his Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July, a reminder of an earlier and better phase.) Yet Cruise is really no more than a cog in the machine. A better actor might supply more grease, but he could not retool the machine. J.J. Abrams, the new director, the third director in three films, a TV director in his feature-film debut, is himself closer to a cog than were either of his forerunners, lacking their established personalities. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, a worse thing, when the established personalities are as gaudy as Brian De Palma's and as grotesque as John Woo's. On a project such as this, there's only so much a director can do, and most of what he can do is to make matters worse. The film -- the series -- the franchise -- remains fatally committed to the ideal of action as swift, smooth, precise, pre-rehearsed, and worry-free as a Cirque du Soleil production number. ("This is intelligence," Laurence Fishburne, the IMF commander, remarks at one point. "So far I haven't seen any." Of athletics and acrobatics we see plenty.) The film remains committed, too, to that lazy and alienating device of the latex mask which will enable anybody, good guy or bad, to assume the identity of anybody else, bad guy or good. And it's an open question whether these masks are less bad here because they are hand-me-downs or even worse because they were held onto: less bad, that is, because innocently inherited or worse because uncritically accepted. The plot is perhaps too slight to be a legitimate contender for Worst Thing: the black-market sale of something code-named the Rabbit's Foot, of which we know only the price ($850 million) and nothing more. Nor do we ever know more. Nor, to be frank, do we ever care to. And a late, a last, a still less legitimate contender for Worst Thing would be the hip-hop title song by Kanye West, "Impossible," over the closing credits. This, though, can be easily avoided by heading for the exit, with all due speed, to the final reprise of that Lalo Schifrin theme. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Michelle Monaghan, Billy Crudup, Ving Rhames. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd