With the amount of running that Tom Cruise does in this latest episode of Mission Impossible, you might confuse it with the London Marathon. Except that the running is usually preceded by or followed with some spectacular high-budget action sequence.

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is now living the quiet life away from active spy work, with his fiancée Julie (Michelle Monaghan). But he is called back into action when one of his former protégés (Keri Russell) goes missing while on the mission of tracking a nefarious and elusive black marketer Qwen Davian (Phillip Seymour Hoffman).

The entire thing plays of as a fairly textbook type plot with damsels in distress, 48 hours to save her life, faithful sidekicks and super villains. After John Woo for Mission Impossible II, JJ Abrams of Alias and Lost fame is placed at the directorial helm for this movie. Abrams probably thought that having the hero fight for the women he cares about will humanise the character as it did for Jack Bauer in the TV series '24'. Might have even worked if the audiences actually cared about the woman as well. There is just way too much exposure to Tom Cruise at the expense of the other characters as well as the plot. The other characters are rarely used and this hardly helps in character development or adding dimensions to the film. Even the character played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, although plastered all over the trailers, has a very insubstantial role.

Overall, besides the bad guy terrorist being invited to a black-tie shindig in the Vatican, a few lip reading tricks and of course the facemasks, nothing much really happens. But then again the movie was obviously meant to be a montage of spectacular action sequences of which there are plenty. Will the audiences buy it? Probably! The presence of a bankable star and high-budget action sequences set in foreign countries are certainly enough to make this movie one of those that people go to when they have nothing else to do. And of course there's the famous soundtrack!