Tom Cruise, Hollywood’s Superhero

The ostensible villain in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is Gabriel (Esai Morales), a shadowy black ops agent servicing a community of global power brokers with a theft here, an assassination there. From his biblical name to his lethal avenging-angel skill set—when you were partying, he studied the blade—Gabriel cuts an imposing figure. But the film’s real big bad—revealed early on enough in the plot that it’s not a spoiler to say so—is a sentient artificial intelligence program known as the Entity, which gets whispered about in secret briefings and is represented visually as a mass of blue tentacles undulating menacingly like a demonic screensaver across laptops, cell phones, and the jumbotrons at a late-night Venetian rave.