Few movie stars can match the career trajectory of Tom Cruise. Since establishing himself as box-office gold in the '80s, the actor hasn’t stopped pumping out the hits. He successfully weathered a few PR blips in the early '00s, and became, according to Steven Spielberg, the man who "saved Hollywood’s ass" in the wake of the pandemic.
These days, the sexagenerian makes headlines for his daring stunt work, multimillion-dollar studio deals and fondness for Birmingham curry houses. But less is written about his standing as a truly exceptional performer.
Where early roles in Top Gun, The Color of Money (both 1986) and Cocktail (1988) proved Cruise’s knack for playing young hotshots with charisma to burn, Barry Levinson’s Rain Man (1988) saw the actor tasked, for the first time, with carrying the emotional weight of a character-driven drama.
As Charlie Babbitt, a self-centred car salesman who embarks on a cross-country odyssey with his institutionalised brother, Cruise flexed his flair for cockiness while also demonstrating an ability to bring nuance to a role. Babbitt begins Rain Man as an unlikeable yuppie and ends it as an object of sympathy; Cruise makes us care for this deeply flawed individual – a trick he’d go on to pull in equally compelling performances throughout the 1990s.
With Born on the Fourth of July (1989), A Few Good Men (1992), Jerry Maguire (1996), Eyes Wide Shut and Magnolia (both 1999), Cruise earned his stripes as a bona-fide leading man capable of intensely emotional performances in action-free movies. Mission: Impossible (1996) may have kicked off his now-inescapable association with stunts and sprinting, but did any other actor bare their soul quite so frequently, and convincingly, as Cruise in the '90s?
I’m not suggesting that Tom Cruise is the greatest actor of all time. But he’s among the most underrated and versatile actors of his generation, and it’s high time more movie fans recognised that. Or is it just me?
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