Mission: Insignificant

Mission: Impossible III will finally swing into Chinese theaters on Thursday, nearly three months after it premiered on the bootleg market.

After surviving some severe cuts - the car chases and gun fights in Shanghai and Xitang have been completely re-edited - from the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, Tom Cruise has a new mission more impossible than winning over China's censors:

"Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make audiences pay more for a dull movie that they already own on DVD."

Yep, this B-movie popcorn-flick will probably fizzle out instead of self-destruct.

All the people who wanted to witness the older and nuttier Cruise (who returns as super-agent Ethan Hunt) dodge bullets have already bought it.

But that is only half the problem: not only have Chinese theatergoers seen it, but there is also nothing new to see. The plot and action sequences are horribly predictable, and M:I III ironically seems to mirror spy-spoof True Lies.

Cruise plays an acrobatic killing machine that wants to have a normal life with his fiancé. Of course, she thinks that he has a boring desk job and only learns of his real identity after being kidnapped by the psychopathic madmen who are threatening the world with a weapon of mass destruction.

Ving Rhames also returns to the series as Hunt's faithful sidekick. Basically, he is the Tom Arnold to Cruise's Arnold Schwarzenegger. When Cruise's character survives a daring Tarzan-like stunt thousands of feet in the air and easily takes out the guards on a near-vertical roof of a skyscraper, Rhames' character says "He made it; he made it … I knew he'd make it."

After two Impossible sequels, it's safe to say that everyone in the theater knew it too.

Director and co-writer J.J. Abrams seems to just want to play the blow-things-up game. He won critical acclaim for Lost and Alias, but it is hard to believe that the director of M:I III is the creator of television's most innovative shows.

Even American audiences, who usually swarm to the theaters when a movie has big-budget explosions or Cruise, seemed uninspired by the film.

It earned $47.7 million the opening weekend in America and did about $10 million worse than Mission: Impossible II, according to Newsweek. Although that number shouldn't be considered too disappointing, it only made about $130 million during its two month run in the country's theaters. That is about $20 million less than its total budget.

Some blame that on Cruise's fading reputation and controversial remarks about Scientology and pregnancy. But people didn't skip out on last summer's flop The Island because of anything Ewan McGregor did in his personal life.

M:I III packs more blah than bang, and its buzz sounds more like an overused golf cart than the Lamborghini presented in the trailer.