Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Running time: 133 minutes

Rated: PG-13 (some language, and sequences of intense -

and intensely absurd -

action and violence)

Is there a star as determined as Tom Cruise to show how hard he works? Is there one as desperate to show how hard he’s working for us?

We’re now in an age of such control that smoothness and the illusion of ease have taken over the movies. Ryan Gosling’s performance in “Drive’’ encapsulates the vogue for a kind of touchless action-hero and all that he does: the appeal of his grace and clenched jaw, the erasure of sweat and strain. I love Gosling and the less archly styled Jason Statham. But Cruise is laughing at them. Cruise will clench his jaw until his teeth shatter - do you think he cares that he just had his man-braces removed? For a paying audience to watch him save the world, he’d have his entire mouth reconstructed. Silly me. I almost typed “pretend to save the world,’’ but isn’t that the difference between Cruise and everybody else? There’s no “cut’’ for him.

We might have given up on Cruise. The runty cockiness, the intense asexuality, the general relentlessness, the sprinting - lord, the sprinting: so passé. But Cruise hasn’t given up on himself. “Ghost Protocol’’ is the fourth “Mission: Impossible’’ in 15 years, and his decision to keep making these ridiculous movies - this one’s “A Tom Cruise Production’’ - doesn’t feel desperate. It feels like a workout. For him. For us. For whoever on the set was responsible for saying, “Tom, that’s a union job’’ or “Mr. Cruise, we have stuntmen to run along the surface of that skyscraper and fling themselves inside.’’

But Cruise knows we’ve come to see him accomplish the absurd. We’ve come to see him do the mission-impossible. We want to believe that that’s him in that sandstorm chasing down a Russian guy with nuclear-bomb codes. That’s him leaping from the ledge of a building and onto a speeding delivery truck. Who else would it be? Cruise, of course, leaves nothing to chance. The cheap high point of these movies always involves someone’s false face being ripped off only to reveal another face. Conveniently, the machine that molds and paints the masks malfunctions at a crucial point in “Ghost Protocol,’’ meaning Cruise can revel in the glory of seeming to kick and chop his own way through another exercise routine - I mean, “scene.’’