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Tom Cruise Used to Do It All
Before making his full-fledged pivot into just action films and nothing else, Tom Cruise used to juggle a variety of roles across different genres and themes. His breakthrough performance was in the 1983 film Risky Business. The role required a strong sense of comedic timing and involved a true character arc. Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised Cruise for successfully making “Joel’s transformation from straight arrow to entrepreneur about as credible as it can be made.” Sealing the deal, of course, was Cruise’s iconic dance scene.
The role that would cement his movie star status was in the original Top G*n, but 1986 was a crucial year for Tom Cruise’s career for several reasons. Not only was Top G*n a massive success at the box office, but he also appeared in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money opposite Paul Newman, proving that he could go toe-to-toe with a legend while working well with one of cinema’s master filmmakers. This one-two punch of distinct characters in different kinds of movies, back-to-back, would be a formula Cruise would go on to repeat successfully for the next two decades. For every mainstream film (Cocktail, Days of Thunder), Cruise would then do a more intimate acting piece (Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July). It was that classic “one for them, one for me” mentality that once allowed Hollywood movie stars to strike that perfect balance between maintaining a robust audience and making passion projects.
Cruise was still committed to the “one for them, one for me” creed throughout the 1990s. He would still play the righteous, All-American everyman in films like A Few Good Men, The Firm, and Jerry Maguire, but the worlds and tones of those films were, at the very least, distinct from one another. More importantly, though, it was during this decade when Cruise took greater artistic risks, playing the legendary immortal vampire Lestat in Interview with the Vampire, a vulgar motivational speaker in Magnolia, and a man consumed with jealousy in Eyes Wide Shut.
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In the midst of all of this, the first Mission: Impossible was released in 1996. Based on the original television series from 1966-1973, the reboot was generally well-received, with particular praise for Cruise’s commanding lead performance as Ethan Hunt. Ten years after Top G*n and six after Days of Thunder, it had been a while since Cruise stepped into the lead role of an action movie, which very well may have helped avoid the criticism he receives today. He hadn’t quite exhausted the persona just yet.
When Tom Cruise Committed to Action and Stopped Acting
Cruise more or less stopped creating characters in the mid-to-late 2000s. Despite the occasional transformative moment, such as his extended cameo in Tropic Thunder, Cruise abandoned the “one for them, one for me” approach and practically stopped working with prestige material altogether. Instead, he has “acted” in fourteen films since 2010, thirteen of which are action movies, eight of which are franchise entries, and five of which are Mission: Impossible films.
It’s not that Cruise has stopped trying. On the contrary, with each action film, he goes out of his way to pull off headline-grabbing stunt sequences. For instance, in a climactic aerial sequence in The Final Reckoning, Cruise hangs onto a real jet 10,000 feet in the air with no crew present and an open cockpit. It’s impressive, to say the least. But when watching any Tom Cruise movie nowadays, it seems as if the “acting” part of his job is just a means to a greater end (that end being whatever the big stunt is).
A Tom Cruise movie used to mean more than an action flick in which Tom Cruise proceeds to “Tom Cruise” all over the screen for over two hours. Watching these films now, it feels like everything that happens in them is unimportant, and any other name attached to each of them—from the directors to the other actors to the character of Ethan Hunt himself—doesn’t matter.
The longer the Mission: Impossible franchise has existed, the more obvious it has become that Cruise has not brought the same transformative character work to Ethan Hunt that he used to bring to every role. Think about it: Who is Ethan Hunt really? He does not have the clever wit of James Bond. The most distinctive thing about him from film to film is his loyalty to his team… and whichever brunette is the female lead of the latest entry. At the end of the day, Ethan Hunt is just Tom Cruise, without the Scientology, and made to look taller.
In promoting The Final Reckoning, although Cruise acknowledged that this will be the last time he plays Ethan Hunt (for now), he is not done making movies. This is a relief not just for fans of the action flicks but for fans of Cruise’s often forgotten earlier work as well. In fact, his upcoming film, directed by Alejandro G. Iñáritú (Birdman, The Revenant), will be his first helmed by a true auteur in over a decade. This could mean that there is some hope for those of us who miss the days when Tom Cruise used to transform into someone else on screen. Perhaps for once, the next Tom Cruise movie will subvert our expectations by having us watch our great American movie star actually act.