The American super-agent and the British super-agent are in love. For a moment, they’re together in Venice, and the British super-agent admits, to her own surprise (and ours), that she’s never been to Venice before. Neither has he, believe it or not. Theirs is a star-crossed love, for they cannot escape their calling. The movie’s Venice is definitely the real Venice, with a fight in a Venetian corridor too narrow to swing a sword in, and a death on an old bridge.

I saw Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning (Part One) in Amsterdam. Early in the film, when the mission is delivered, the mission that Tom Cruise / Ethan Hunt will inevitably choose to accept (it takes the form of an analog tape deck that self-destructs after five seconds), the location-title reveals that he’s in Amsterdam, which made the audience around me titter: hey that’s where we are, too! But the film never shows us Amsterdam, only a nondescript shadowy interior, so now I just assume that every screening of the movie names whatever city the screening is in.

Before pondering the locations of action cinema (and thus the vectors of our own nostalgias and aspirations), let us briefly rehearse the mystique of Tom Cruise’s action-hero Method-acting, and its storied relationship to cinema as art and industry.