Is getting Tom Cruise to do more than grunt and squint through a scene the most impossible mission of all?

Tom Cruise, reactive but impermeable, has spent his whole career learning how to make faces, mastering the semaphore of sensitivity. But listening to his fellow actors in a scene — or even just acknowledging their presence — is still beyond him. In the opening sequence of "Mission: Impossible III," Cruise, as secret agent Ethan Hunt, has been drugged, beaten and handcuffed to a chair. Baddie Philip Seymour Hoffman has kidnapped Ethan’s wife, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), and he wants Ethan to watch as he tortures her. As Hoffman coos and flutters around the terrified woman, Cruise squints, blinks and bucks. The scene is all about suffering — his, not hers — and later, as he clutches the corpse of a fallen agent to his manly pectorals, the camera lingers on the held-back tears in his eyes. Cruise is so busy squeezing out his hard little nuggets of feeling that he’s incapable of letting anything in. Signal sent! Objective achieved! If there are other actors in the scene, Cruise hasn’t noticed them. No one’s going to sink his battleship.

If all you want from an action hero is muscle, Cruise is a suitable enough specimen — he has all the definition of a firm bundt cake. But in an action picture directed by J.J. Abrams, shouldn’t you want more? Abrams is the creator of two television shows, "Alias" and "Lost," that have found loyal audiences partly because Abrams understands the difference between merely building suspense and using cross play between characters to sustain it. Like Joss Whedon before him — whose novelistic TV series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Angel" and "Firefly" continue to find new devotees, years after they’ve gone off the air — Abrams has a feel for the panoramic narrative possibilities of television. He allows us the luxury of getting to know the characters, even as he keeps the action taut. The emotional intensity of these shows is part of the fun: On "Alias," Jennifer Garner’s CIA agent Sydney Bristow may love her enigmatic father, fellow agent Jack Bristow (Victor Garber), but the nature of their work — and their very nature as people — means that she can never really trust him. Mistrust bonds them closer than love does. Their relationship is a metaphor for the uneasy tangle that working (and living) in the modern world presents, the way "balancing" work and family often feels less like actual balancing than about trying to control a dense network of stressed-out threads that threaten to slip out of our grasp at any moment.

Of course, the challenge for Abrams — making his movie directorial debut here — is to do everything he does best on television, but to pack it into the space of a two-hour movie. That’s not a challenge that can be humanly met (not even Whedon, with his beautifully made movie spinoff of "Firefly," "Serenity," could quite pull it off). And yet "Mission: Impossible III" is serviceably entertaining. Abrams doesn’t just slap his ideas on the screen. The picture is coherent and well organized, and there are lots of Abrams touches tucked in the corners: Miniature bombs get planted in people’s brains (via the nasal cavity, natch). There’s a sexy computer geek, played by Simon Pegg, of "Shaun of the Dead." And Abrams gives free rein to his fondness for McGuffins: Here, it’s a deadly serum-in-a-canister known only as "the Rabbit’s Foot" — we don’t know what it does, but we know it’s something pretty darn awful.