Whether it’s a $1-million security system at his L.A. home or a $10-million bomb shelter in Colorado to shield from alien attacks, money is no object for Tom Cruise to protect his family.

Or at least he wants it to look that way. I find it incredibly unconscionable that he and Katie Holmes insist on courting the paparazzi when it’s clear that two-year-old Suri is in emotional distress at the constant barrage of media attention.

Exhibit A: The photo at right was taken as they left their apartment building in NYC’s East Village last week. That building has a back door, btw, if they wanted to leave without attracting a scrum of photographers. But clearly that’s not a priority.

Is anyone else disturbed by how Katie is grinning and Tom seems totally nonperturbed while Suri is crying and covering her ears in fright?

For the little girl who has everything — from custom-made Christian Louboutins to her own gymnasium — what she seems to really need is some normalcy. Sad that she’s never going to get it from her freakshow family.

The reviews are coming in for superhero popcorn flick Hancock, and it’s not looking pretty.

Which would make it the first Will Smith vehicle opening for the Fourth of July weekend to not make everyone involved a zillion dollars.

Hmm. So what’s changed?

Could it be that Will has been tainted by his alleged association with Scientology? War of the Worlds wasn’t exactly a smash hit, and it came out right after Tom Cruise’s infamous couch jumping. And we all remember Battlefield: Earth (or more precisely, we remember hearing how bad it was from the dozen people who saw it).

So despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, Will has maintained that he is not a Scientologist. The latest denial (conveniently timed, no?) comes from that school he donated to in May, which now swears that they are secular.

I have to say, it’s a start. Let’s all hope Hancock bombs and Will’s soul — and not his thetans — will be saved.

According to Broadway producer Eric Falkenstein, Katie Holmes’s bullcrap radar is a finely tuned instrument.

Falkenstein is the big cheese behind the upcoming All My Sons production, starring Katie, in New York.

“Katie’s not a celebrity type,” Falkenstein says. “She’s done brilliant work in films like Pieces of April and The Ice Storm.

“Ann starts out as a simple, sweet, average Midwesterner, and by the finale gets up the gumption to stand and confront what’s wrong,” he adds.

He calls Holmes “a natural sweetheart who can sniff out phonies … Katie basically has that exact moral fiber [of her character in the play].”

Are we talking about the same Katie Holmes? The one who auditioned for the part of Mrs. Tom Cruise three years ago (a bit of a profile-increasing move, no?) and was swiftly indoctrinated into her husband’s religion cult of Scientology — some of the most public phonies around — which seems to have turned her into a hollow shell of a woman.

One can only hope that, like her character, in the end she wizens up and confronts the travesty of what’s happened to her life.