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Tom Cruise dangles from a parachute, rappels from a Shanghai skyscraper and is suspended from an ancient wall in Vatican City.

But Cruise doesn’t leave us hanging with this Mission: Impossible. The third film in the definitive action franchise of our age gives up some of its whooping, pulse-pounding cool, as it changes directors from the great John Woo to the TV-bred (Alias, Lost) J.J. Abrams. Whatever it loses in cool, it gains in urgency and heart.

We begin with a scene near the climax. Ethan Hunt (Cruise) is bound and being tortured. A loved one is bound and threatened in front of him. And since the guy doing the threatening is Oscar-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote), we pay attention.

Even when he’s demanding to know where “the rabbit’s foot” is. That’s this movie’s “Maguffin,” Hitchcock’s nickname for the arbitrary gadget — valuable or dangerous — that everyone wants and thus drives the plot.

Hunt’s IMF agency has a “mole” in it, that tired device of too many thrillers (See The Sentinel). That sets him up as a “rogue” who is both hunting his deadly quarry (Hoffman) and is being hunted by his own (Laurence Fishburne).

Fishburne, an agency head, has most of the best lines.

“This is Intelligence. So far I haven’t seen any!”

But wait. As the film flashes back to how Hunt got himself into the torture scene, we learn he isn’t supposed to be in the field anymore. He’s getting married (to Katie Holmes look-alike Michelle Monaghan). He has a nice “cover” job, at the Virginia Department of Transportation.

Still, when a protege (Keri Russell) has been captured, Hunt goes to get her. And that’s when he rejoins his team (Ving Rhames, Maggie Q, Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and runs afoul of the super-villain. And torturing people? It’s something good guy and bad guy have in common.

Abrams runs through an “Action Cinema’s Greatest Hits” of gags, recycling the Cruise-dangling bits from earlier “Missions,” a bridge ambush from True Lies, a helicopter chase from James Bond, sadistic tortures and improbable escapes. The spycraft toys are of the slightly far-fetched variety, in the best Bond tradition.

The new twist is the whole “relationship” angle, something James Bond was never able to master. Here, you’ve got fellow agents (Rhames) lecturing Hunt on what marriage will mean to his wife, “messing up her life.” And since we’ve seen that first scene, where the villain aims to keep his promise, to “make her bleed and cry and call your name,” we understand.

Butter up

Abrams is lucky in his star. Cruise’s Hunt can be a caring husband-to-be, frightened for his wife. But he can shut down emotion and go on super-agent auto-pilot when the chips are down.

Cruise, too much in the news for his general loopiness these days, runs like a man with a ticking bomb in his head. He has to bring his A-game, because Hoffman is believably vile and dangerous.

This Mission unfolds at a near dead-sprint — frenetic editing, whiplash camera pans, all hiding an intentionally under-explained plot and generic action beats that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a ticking-clock thriller.

But if Mission: Impossible III is the first pitch of the popcorn movie season, just two words come to mind — butter up.

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