Note to Hollywood: it is possible to have bad publicity.

Darin hates gossip. He is so not interested in people’s private lives. My one-time ability to converse on the minutiae about people I’d never met made him crazy (alas, I have gotten busy with other things, like my own life, so I am no longer as on top of pointless things as I used to be). He not only doesn’t care, he actively avoids the subject, okay?

At the start of Mission: Impossible III there is an extended scene about the domestic happiness of Tom Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt, at an engagement party for him and his fiancée. Many, many shots of Tom beaming love at Michelle Monaghan, who plays his intended, Julia.

Darin leans over to me and says, “You know, he just seems totally gay now.”

Note to Mr. Cruise’s lawyers: Not that he is gay, of course. It is just that Mr. Cruise has had very, very bad personal publicity recently, which has led to, uh, rampant speculation about such things.

The movie itself is fine, for the kind of movie it is. Lots and lots of action; not so much plot. We saw it three days ago and while I remember individual scenes quite well, the entire thing holds together less well. There are incredible sequences at the Vatican, on a water bridge highway in Florida, in Singapore. And I’m sure if I sat down and thought about it I could reconstruct why all of these various things were happening. But seriously: don’t really wanna.

The ostensible plot is that Tom Cruise and Friends (his buds at the Impossible Mission Force, like Ving Rhames) want to get Uber-bad guy Philip Seymour Hoffman. One flaw of the movie is that while we’re often told that PSH is a seriously world-class bad dude, we don’t actually see him being a bad dude. (Except for the scene where he beats up Tom Cruise. And you know, sometimes you just feel like beating up Tom Cruise.) So they get PSH at Vatican, and then he manages to escape on that Florida highway. In revenge, PSH kidnaps Ms. Monaghan in order to force Cruise to do his evil bidding. Much action ensues.

If you want to see extremely intricate, well-choreographed action scenes — director JJ Abrams did a great job with those — this is a great movie for that. Plot and characterization? Not so much. Simon Pegg does have a very funny turn as an IMF technician who helps Tom Cruise with his mission.