A-List: Top Five Tom Cruise Movies
By J. Don Birnam
August 27, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The rules for this one are simple - if Tom Cruise is in the movie then it’s eligible. As with other A-Lists about a particular actor, I’ll try to focus on the performance more than on the movie, although the two are always difficult to separate. What is remarkable in listing movies about Tom Cruise is that since his entry into the scene in 1981, Cruise has starred as an actor in approximately one movie every year, sometimes more, and he shows no real signs of stopping.
In going through the list, I realized I like almost all of Cruise’s movies that I’ve seen (and I’ve seen over 25 of approximately 33). Indeed, the only dishonorable mention that I can think of is Jerry Maguire. I realize this is a very popular movie, but I found it to be trite, overwritten, and over-acted. Jerry Maguire is essentially Cruise trying to rediscover the goodwill he obtained from acting as a boy’s boy, a man’s man, as he did in Risky Business (the movie that made him a superstar). It didn’t work. While the love interest between Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay works charmingly in Risky Business, it feels unreal between him and Zellweger in Jerry Maguire.
Aside from that, however, it is difficult to argue with any of his movies. Sure, few of them are deep or profound explorations of the meaning of life. Instead, they are all unabashed crowd-pleasers. So what? There is a place for that in the art of cinema too, and few have managed to do it better than Tom Cruise in this roughly-century-old medium.
The honorable mentions are many and varied. I loved his stoic performance as the ill-fated hero in Valkyrie (but I’m a WWII nerd), I found he was able to keep his own next to Oscar-winning performances in both Rain Man and The Color of Money, and I shared in his despair, melancholy, and emotional confusion as the misunderstood hero in The Last Samurai.
His two collaborations with Spielberg, Minority Report and War of the Worlds, are also favorites of mine, as Cruise plays the dramatic, scared action hero well, and he contrasts with the tougher, in-charge role that he normally is accustomed to. War of the Worlds is also the highest-grossing of Cruise’s hits, followed closely by most of the Mission Impossible movies.
Finally, the sixth place slot likely goes to one of the most classic popular movies of all time, Top Gun. Ah, that young Val Kilmer, and that song. But it was Cruise who arguably stole the show as the maverick…um, Maverick. The young, wild, good at heart, man’s man air force pilot who wants the girl and the glory. Yeah, the story is trite in that sense, but Cruise pulls it off with his charming smile and his disaffected delivery. In any case, Top Gun is a classic of 1980s cinema, bar none. Adjusted for inflation, it is still Cruise’s most successful movie of all time.
On to the main event.
5. Collateral (2004)
One of the few times that Tom Cruise has not played the hero is in the crime thriller Collateral. Instead, a handsomely salt-and-peppered Cruise is a hitman who takes on an unwitting Jamie Foxx as his cab driver while he embarks on a night of crime. The movie, without Cruise, may have been another forgettable Liam Neeson-type shoot-them-all kind of product. Instead, Cruise is notable for his steely delivery and his positively evil gesturing. It becomes clear, in fact, that behind Cruise’s devilish smile is a darker personality, that the line between the charm and the hate is thin, and that he is entirely in control of it. Cruise’s character even wavers between the two, in a key scene where he charms Foxx’s elderly mother into liking him.
But Cruise is all business and no compassion in this well-reviewed movie, which was also a box office success, even though he is not likely to reprise his out-of-type casting as a villain any time soon.
4. Magnolia (1999)
I hesitated before putting Cruise’s supporting role in this cast-of-characters film on the list, but it deserves it all the way. Cruise plays the enigmatic con artist and self-help guru Frank Mackey, who has a tortured relationship with his father and his trophy wife, and who feels traumatized by being abandoned by his mother.
In one of the few movies in which Cruise does not appear as a debonair character (instead, he dons a crazy beard, hair, and outfit), he also gave us perhaps a preview of what was yet to come in his real life: a couch-jumping maniac who is kooky and weird while undeniably smart. Perhaps it was because of the ease of essentially playing himself, but Cruise once more demonstrated that he is a serious actor able to display a wide range of emotions and evoke a diverse array of feelings. Magnolia is, after all, a dark comedy as much as it is a straight drama, and it is admirable that Cruise was able to deliver so poignantly in yet another genre.
For his turn, Cruise received his to-date last Oscar nomination but lost to Michael Caine’s facile portrayal of the enigmatic doctor in The Cider House Rules. While Caine is a fine actor, the fact that Cruise lost to the only one of the nominees who already had a statuette and who gave, easily, the worst of the five performances, shows that there is a serious contingency in the Academy that does not like him.
For shame, because the versatility he exhibited with his performance in Magnolia will resonate in his favor, later.
3. Eyes Wide Shut (2000) In his final collaboration with then-spouse Nicole Kidman, Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut did something that he does not normally do in movies - portrayed himself as a hyper-sexual being.
Put in context, his high-profile divorce of Kidman was probably the beginning of the end for his likability in the broader public, so this movie stands out for that reason as well.
But, on its merits, one has to admire the risks that they both took under Kubrick’s wing in Eyes Wide Shut. I once heard Kidman speak of her experience filming this movie, Kubrick’s last, and recall how she described Kubrick’s direction of both of them to get in touch with their sexual selves without inhibition before the camera. The master delivered in his final act, and it was Cruise that benefited the most from it.
Rumors of his sexuality (which have dogged him forever) aside, Cruise showed yet another side of himself here. Whereas in Collateral he was the bad guy, a role he doesn’t normally play, and in Magnolia he was an eccentric loon, another out-of-type character, in Eyes Wide Shut he ventured into the as-of-yet unexplored (for him) field of neo-noir psycho-sexual thriller. No easy task, considering the beautiful woman he played opposite. His delivery of enigmatic and ultimately problematic and disturbing epitaphs at Kidman works - he successfully makes the audience’s skin crawl, and this is one of his most memorable performances.
2. Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
Real life Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic wrote an incendiary autobiography about his experiences in Vietnam, his eventual disillusionment with it, and his renowned anti-war stance in the later years of his life. Oliver Stone adapted it into a movie of the same name, which landed Tom Cruise his first Academy Award nomination.
The difficulty of playing Ron Kovic cannot be understated. Had the story covered only the days in which Kovic fought in Vietnam, it could have easily been dismissed as another Cruise action movie that happened to have a connection to real life. But Cruise had to show incredible depth and range to depict the torrent of emotions that Kovic experienced when he returned home - guilt, confusion, isolation, anger, hatred, and compatriotism with the other veteran who understood him. He had to do this while bound to the wheelchair that Kovic found himself in after sustaining injuries in Vietnam, and he had to do it at a time when he was known simply as a popular action figure, and not a serious actor.
Cruise delivered. His technique is impeccable, heart-wrenching, and sincere. The emotion he portrays is real, it oozes off the screen. One feels, more than anything, pity for the sad things that happened to this man, on top of admiration for the courage it must have taken him to adopt some of the loud anti-war positions that he did take during his life time.
It is hard to argue with the Academy’s decision to award Daniel Day Lewis magnificent performance in My Left Foot over the younger Cruise, but in retrospect, with Day Lewis now sporting three lead acting Oscars, it is a shame that Cruise has never received one. Perhaps one day he will get a Paul Newman-type award, but his shenanigans off screen may get in the way.
1. A Few Good Men (1992)
Look, I know what you’re thinking. “A Few Good Men?!” Yes, I realize I’ve left The Firm, Interview with the Vampire, and Vanilla Sky, not to mention the other four of the top five movies on the table. As with other columns, I will not pretend that this is the objective best of the movies I’ve analyzed today.
But it is, by leaps and bounds, my own favorite Tom Cruise performance of all time.
He has never been more handsome, more straight-edged while being a bad boy, and more crushing of the bad guys as he was in this 1992 smash hit. Many kids watched Tom Cruise movies growing up, as I did, and many wanted to be like he was in a lot of those movies - an admired if troubled war hero, a cool, debonair cocktail bartender (in Cocktail), a daring air force pilot, a pool hall shark, or a misunderstood teenager who sang in his underwear with his air guitar - but not me. I wanted to be a nerdy lawyer who discovered the truth behind a mysterious murder by reasoning myself into the outcome and tricking the secretly evil but powerful figure into a confession on the stand a la Agatha Christie.
In A Few Good Men, Cruise plays the predictably disaffected and disinterested Lieutenant Kaffee, who is entrusted with the defense of two marines accused of the murder of one of their own. Kaffe cannot be bothered to make an effort for the men, and wants to coopt a plea so that he can keep his win-loss record intact. His cynicism makes him unlikable but likable at the same time, particularly as it yields to idealism, a driving desire to win, and more.
And who, of course, could forget one of the most memorable lines in the history of modern cinema: “You can’t handle the truth!” That line, of course, was delivered by Jack Nicholson, but it was in the rapid-fire banter between him and Cruise that it arose, after Cruise emphatically demanded from Nicholson’s Colonel, “I want answers!” “You want answers?!” “I want the truth!!” The classic line does not really work without the perfect setup, and Cruise provided it.
And I hold it dear because the movie played a non-insignificant part in driving yours truly into a career in law - although perhaps that is as much a reason to hate the movie than to love it, but in any case is a subject for another day.