So Tom Cruise is going to make Mission: Impossible 4. Let’s get all the obvious gags out of the way now, shall we?

Hey, what’s the impossible mission this time? Reviving Tom Cruise’s career? Ha. Finding Tom Cruise a decent haircut? Ha. Trying to convince the world that Tom Cruise isn’t a boggle-eyed religious fanatic? Ha. Making Tom Cruise the size of a normal human being? Ha. Getting Tom Cruise to convincingly marry a woman? Ha. Trying to get Tom Cruise to promote a movie without making an overwhelming arsehole of himself? Haaaa.

Oh boy, this is going to be fun.

Let’s have a quick quiz. What was your favourite part of any of the last three Mission: Impossible movies? It’s a difficult question, huh? There are just so many moments to choose from. Like in the first Mission: Impossible where Tom Cruise, you know, did that thing that we can’t really remember very well. Or in Mission: Impossible 2, where Tom Cruise was all like “Aargh” for reasons that seem to elude us. Or what about Mission: Impossible 3, which might have been partly set in China unless we’re thinking of another film. Classics, the lot of them.

Or at least we’re assuming they’re classics. All of them were so massively forgettable from start to finish that we usually need to be reminded who everyone is, what they’re doing, why they’re doing it and why we agreed to watch them doing it every 20 minutes or so. The world needs another Mission: Impossible movie like it needs to be liked in the jaw by a horse.

So the good news is that there’s going to be another Mission: Impossible movie and Tom Cruise is involved and everything. AP reports:

Tom Cruise and J.J. Abrams have chosen to accept another impossible mission. Cruise and Abrams have signed on to produce a fourth installment of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise for Paramount. Abrams directed Cruise’s last outing as covert operative Ethan Hunt in 2006’s “Mission: Impossible III.”

It’s slightly shocking news, isn’t it? Not because Sumner Redstone famously booted Tom Cruise from Paramount after his reputation as a babbling religion-zonked lunatic stopped just about everyone from watching it, but because it just shows how desperate Tom Cruise is to be liked again.

Because, up until now, Tom Cruise’s career rehabilitation has been going horribly. Lions For Lambs was a dreary misfire and Valkyrie did the impossible and made the star of an anti-Hitler movie even less popular than Hitler in Germany. And now he’s returning to his past in an effort to reclaim his former glory. Which would be good, except that the part of his past that he’s decided to return to is the crappy part that’s sort of a sub-Bourne James Bond rip-off that nobody is really that interested in seeing.

But still, on the plus side Tom Cruise will be approaching 50 by the time Mission: Impossible 4 comes out, so at least there’s a decent chance that he’ll throw his back out while leaping around on Oprah Winfrey’s furniture to promote it. And that’s something we’d happily watch.

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Just look at Tom Cruise. Just the other week he was in the worst professional state of his career, then he zipped over to Oprah and – blam – there’s suddenly a lot of talk about him returning to Paramount to make Mission: Impossible 4.

If this Mission: Impossible 4 talk is true then it’s an incredible turnaround for Tom Cruise. And just in the nick of time, too – if we all cross our fingers tight enough and maybe chant a little, then the thrill of being given a second chance to make more blockbuster movies might just turn Tom Cruise back into the obnoxiously cocksure prick that we all remember from the good old days.

Tom Cruise is no fun these days, because even he’s realised that his career’s in trouble. Nobody went to see Lions For Lambs and Valkyrie has as much of a bad buzz as you’d expect a movie about a one-eyed German midget with an American accent trying to blow up Hitler with some hand luggage to have.

But worse still, Tom Cruise is just rolling over and taking the criticism now. Look at Tom’s interview on Oprah; he was so hushed and quick to apologise for everything that Oprah probably could have kicked a puppy in the face during the interview and got Tom Cruise to take the blame for it.

That’s not Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise is the tiny man who laughs too loud at everything, greets people by clicking his fingers and pointing at them at the same time and can barely go five seconds without grinning like an infuriatingly smug bastard who you want to push face-first down a staircase. That’s the Tom Cruise we want to see again, not Tom Cruise the whiny sodding girly victim we’re lumbered with now.

And we might just get the old Tom Cruise back, if his plans to make Mission: Impossible 4 come to fruition. He wasn’t supposed to make Mission: Impossible 4, you see – not since his crackpot behaviour during the promotion of Mission: Impossible 3 caused Sumner Redstone to effectively sack him from Paramount on the basis that all women hate him.

There was talk that Brad Pitt would take Tom Cruise’s place on Mission: Impossible 4, but when Sumner Redstone and Tom Cruise were seen eating lunch together, suspicions were raised that Tom Cruise might be on the way back. And that was all but confirmed yesterday when Redstone called Tom Cruise a ‘good friend’ during a press conference in Seoul. The Associated Press reports:

Despite the severed relationship, Cruise, 45, is in talks with Paramount to star in a fourth “Mission: Impossible” film. Viacom is Paramount’s parent company. “I consider Tom Cruise a great actor and a good friend,” Redstone said. “And if Paramount decides — and they will make the decision — to move ahead with him, I will not object.” The 84-year-old Redstone said Tuesday that he did not know if Cruise would be chosen for the film. “That’s up to Brad Gray, who runs Paramount,” Redstone said. “He will make the decision.”

You have to admire Tom Cruise and Sumner Redstone for getting over their differences here, but it was inevitable that this would happen – some things are just meant to be together, and that includes commercially-crippled movie stars and octogenarian billionaires with faces like the melting Nazi at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

Read more:

Mogul Redstone: Cruise can star in next ‘Mission Impossible’ – AP