March 11, 2022
Still trying to wrap your head around the fact that Tom Cruise is almost 60? Yeah, me too. If you missed part one of my look at his career and my top ten Cruise movies, you can find it here. With such a storied career as we have seen from this superstar, it wasn’t easy to rank his best films, but we’re now at my top five. Let’s jump in.
5. Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
With the emergence of “Cruise, the serious actor” as opposed to “Cruise, the action star” starting with The Color of Money and Rain Man, his potential as an actor was on full display with Oliver Stone’s story of Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic. Born on the 4th of July was based on Kovic’s memoir of his time growing up in Long Island, his experiences in Vietnam, and then his changing beliefs on the war, leading to his time as an activist fighting against the war. This is probably the hardest film to watch of any Cruise movie that I am covering because the subject matter is so intense, particularly the scenes in Vietnam and the deplorable conditions at the Veterans hospital where Kovic recovers after being shot, which led to his paralysis. But despite that difficult content, I think this might be his best performance. He plays Kovic from his high-school days as an idealistic teenager eager to serve his country, through the trauma of his time in Vietnam, to his difficult transition back to an everyday life in the United States, all the way to his eyes being opened to a feeling of an abandonment of the Vietnam War troops by the government. It is a true tour de force performance from Cruise throughout the various stages of Kovic’s life. While it may be his best performance, I wouldn’t consider it my favorite, given the challenging subject matter, which is why it’s not number one on this list.
Stone has a long history of weaving his own experiences in Vietnam into his filmmaking. He deservedly won Oscars for 1986’s Platoon, a harrowing tale of innocence lost in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Born on the 4th of July was kind of a spiritual sequel to Platoon, using the real-life experience of Kovic to tell the story of what happened to the veterans after the war. He went back to Vietnam for Heaven and Earth, told from the perspective of a young Vietnamese woman, and also included themes of the war as heavy influences for JFK and Nixon, two movies that I like a lot. Needless to say, Stone utilized his filmmaking skills to work through the trauma he was still dealing with from his time fighting in the war.
I recently rewatched Born on the 4th of July for the first time in a number of years in preparation for this post. It still resonated with me a great deal, especially the way we watch Cruise grow as an actor. The supporting cast is all pretty strong, and Stone does a wonderful job in bringing the scenery to life – the small-town feel of Massapequa, Long Island, the war scenes in Vietnam, the anti-war protests, and Kovic’s time in Mexico with other veterans facing the same difficulties acclimating to live back in the U.S. I do wonder what this story would look like if it were made today. The film is only 2 ½ hours long, which is pretty short when you are telling such a full story as Kovic’s. But there are some events missing – for instance, we don’t see any scenes of him during his Marine training. We go right from the high-school prom to the middle of his second tour in Vietnam. I suspect in today’s Hollywood, this story would be a six-part television series that would be more inclusive of the events of Kovic’s life, but would probably feel bloated. It’s much more rewarding to see the full journey in one sitting. Bonus note for this movie – a fantastic soundtrack: American Pie, Brown Eyed Girl, a great version of Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall by Edie Brickell (who performs it in the film), and a beautiful score from John Williams.
4. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
The Groundhog Day trope has been done many times over the years, across all genres. You’ve got the slapstick comedy from the original, an excellent romantic comedy from 2020 (Palm Springs), a decent teenage romance version from last year (The Map of Tiny Perfect Things), an action thriller that I’ve heard great things about, but haven’t seen yet (Source Code with Jake Gyllenhaal, an actor I like a lot), a good old-fashioned horror movie (Happy Death Day), and even a television series (Russian Doll, a pretty good Netflix show). The trick in making these films work is to provide enough continuity in the story so that we see that the person is repeating the same day over and over again, without repeating every single scene through each iteration so much that we get sick of them (a minor fault I see with Groundhog Day). It’s also more important to have a compelling mission to get the person out of the time loop, and less important to tell us how it happened in the first place. In 2014, Tom Cruise jumped into the repeating day cycle fighting aliens alongside one of the best actresses working today, Emily Blunt.
Edge of Tomorrow (originally called Live, Die, Repeat) takes place in the “future” when aliens have had a five-year grip on the planet and countries are working together to defeat them. The background is laid out in a quick prologue to start the movie, giving enough of an appetizer to get us started, but not too much that we get bogged down in how we got here. It’s probably interesting to note that this picture (released in 2014) takes place in 2020. Insert your own apocalypse joke here.
Cruise portrays a private in the army, but he’s really a PR guy living in a world where everyone has a military role to play. When he is forced into joining a mission at the front, his fear of war is on full display, especially being around the experienced veteran group he joins. After getting sprayed by an alien toxin and seemingly dying, he wakes up to relive the previous day. And thus, our adventure gets underway.
This movie works for so many reasons, despite an ending that is a little convoluted. First, Cruise is outstanding in this role, playing a reluctant action hero. He is not playing the smartest, toughest guy that we usually see. He is terrified of dying, he can’t figure out what is happening to him, and how to get out of it. By dying many times (spoiler), he is literally failing over and over again – a pattern we rarely see from Cruise. Insert the real smartest, toughest person in the movie, played by Emily Blunt. She portrays another member of the squad, who is a hero from a previous battle that defeated some aliens. Cruise soon discovers that she experienced the same time loop he is facing, and the two pair up to defeat the enemy. Blunt is fantastic in Edge of Tomorrow, and is the true hero of the movie, despite Cruise’s star power. She schools him on how to fight the aliens in combat and the two of them have excellent chemistry. What I liked so much about the film is the way Cruise and Blunt play off of each other, with more funny moments than you would expect in an action-thriller featuring aliens taking over the planet. With all of the movies Cruise has made in the last twenty years, Edge of Tomorrow is probably the most underrated among the general public.
3. Top Gun (1986)
Here’s hoping the sequel we get later this year lives up to the original, which (despite a little cheesiness that reminds us a little too much of the 1980s) was a monster hit and is still a damn good movie. We all know the story – Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, renegade fighter pilot, joins an elite training school in California with his partner “Goose,” played by Anthony Edwards. Maverick is chasing the memory of his dead father, always pushing the envelope in his fighter jet in a futile attempt to prove he is as good as his father. Maverick and Goose get into plenty of hot water by skirting the rules, general f*cking around (like buzzing the tower) and demonstrating an unhealthy level of testosterone while competing with the other pilots. Maverick’s chief rival is “Iceman”, played by Val Kilmer in a deliciously evil turn, and his love interest is “Charlie”, an instructor at the flight school, played by Kelly McGillis. That was the thing about the 1980s – everyone had cool names or nicknames. Look at Ferris, Cameron, and Sloan – be honest, how many people did you know with those names? I definitely didn’t know a Maverick.
The action sequences in Top Gun are what make the movie so rewatchable after all of these years. I have no idea how realistic any of it is (does it really matter?), I just know that it’s fun to see the suspense of the pilots battling the Russians (at the peak of Cold War tension in the country), or having fun at other people’s expense (like flipping the bird to another pilot in the opening sequence.) Despite the popularity of Top Gun, one of the criticisms it received upon release was that it was too “pro-military.” What does that even mean? Can’t we just enjoy a popcorn movie for f*cks sake? The iconic lines are also fantastic – How many times did you say “I feel the need. The need for speed.” in the 1980s? One modern day criticism though is some of the cheesy scenes, which I have to agree with – for instance, imagine the reaction of a 16 year-old watching the volleyball scene today. Or the super creepy scene where Maverick casually follows Charlie into the bathroom like a stalker. And those love scenes are a little overcooked, wouldn’t you say? Despite a few minor quibbles, I still like it. And try to convince me that you don’t get a little nostalgic if you stumble upon Danger Zone on your SiriusXM 80s channel. Those 80s memories are the best.
2. Jerry Maguire (1996)
Everybody loves a comeback story. We always want to root for the underdog to win. So, when we see our leading man light his career on fire in the opening sequence of Jerry Maguire, we are naturally rooting for him to succeed the rest of the way, even if he is a very flawed man. And when your main character is played by America’s superstar (and the script by master screenwriter Cameron Crowe certainly helps), it’s easy to see why this is such a winning movie. And for all of the attention heaped on Cuba Gooding Jr. (who won the Oscar for his performance), the wholesome performance from Renée Zellweger (that I covered in my Best Movie Moms post), brief flashes of brilliance from Regina King, Kelly Preston, Jay Mohr, Bonnie Hunt, and Beau Bridges, let’s not forget who owns this picture – it’s Tom Cruise. Jerry Maguire was released the same year as Mission: Impossible, delivering us a double-shot of the best of Cruise – action star and romantic charmer, and also helped audiences forget about the ill-advised choice to star in Interview with the Vampire (but, at least he tried).
When sports-agent Maguire has a crisis of faith in his career (and the industry of treating athletes like meal-tickets to paychecks, and not actual human beings), he writes a memo (sorry, Mission Statement) advocating for a more personal approach to managing clients – spending more time with fewer clients. It naturally leads to his firing and a truly memorable sequence where he loses his cool, and barely keeps one client, the flashy wide receiver played by Gooding. Of course, that sequence led to one of the more overworked jokes in any negotiating scenario by anyone ever for the next twenty years – “Show me the money!” It’s still funny in the movie, though. Maguire develops a personal relationship with Dorothy, the only member of his company who goes with him on his mission to start his own firm, played by Zellweger. They start out as colleagues, then friends, then something deeper, which is further complicated by Dorothy’s son, Ray (Jonathan Lipnicki, in a hysterically cute performance).
If there is one thing that we’ve learned over the years, it’s that Cameron Crowe is one of the best storytellers we have making films. He wrote and directed Jerry Maguire and is responsible for such gems as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Say Anything…, Almost Famous, and many more. The guy just knows how to write rich characters and bring them together in a compelling story that you just have to keep watching. We see throughout Jerry Maguire our leading man trying to salvage the wreckage of his career, all while realizing he is falling in love with a woman, which could lead to a life as a family man, and not the bachelor lifestyle he’s used to experiencing. It’s not easy facing the fact that you’re not a kid anymore – even if you don’t come to that conclusion until you are in your 30s and living in a world surrounded by men and women who play games for a living. Jerry isn’t used to real-world problems – he’s only worried about securing the next contract or endorsement deal for his client. That’s what makes Jerry Maguire work so well – we get to see him grow from (as Dorothy puts it) the man he is now to the man he wants to be. And let’s face it – every time you hear Dorothy say to Jerry, “Just shut up….you had me at ‘Hello’” – it still gets to you, right?
1. A Few Good Men (1992)
One of the podcasts I listen to, The Rewatchables, showcases a movie each week where the hosts chat about the film, give inside information behind the making of it, and give out silly awards. The premise behind the podcast is to pick movies that are eminently “rewatchable”. The host (Bill Simmons) will often say that if he is flipping around the cable channels and a certain scene from the movie is on, he knows he’s going to stick around for a while. Now, whenever I hear him say that, I think “do people really do that anymore?” Well, I do. But I’m old. Granted, he’s a few years older than me. Anyway, about a week ago, I looked around to see what was on at that time and saw that A Few Good Men had just started on a cable channel, so I turned it on. Of course, when I realized it was on a channel that was dubbing in “friendlier language” than what was included in the movie, I had to turn it off. I’m sorry – I can’t watch a sanitized version of Colonel Jessup. But I’ve seen this one so many times (going back to its theatrical release in 1992), I practically have it memorized.
Long before he started the (ill-advised) experiment of directing films, Aaron Sorkin was a top-notch writer. He is actually still pretty good, but for a 20 year stretch starting in the early 1990s, he was virtually unstoppable. His first splash in Hollywood was writing the script for A Few Good Men, based on his successful Broadway play. The film was directed by Rob Reiner, who was in the middle of an incredible run of hit pictures including The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally…, and Misery. So, you bring together a top screenwriter and a top director and a fantastic courtroom drama – what else do you need? Oh, I don’t know – how about Cruise and Nicholson?
Want to know how big of a star Cruise was at this point in the 1990s? Well, in 1989, Nicholson took on the role of The Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman. Now, you have to remember that back in the 1980s, we weren’t seeing a regular assembly line of superhero movies hitting the theaters every few months. Other than the Superman films with Christopher Reeve, this just wasn’t a thing in Hollywood yet. Cut to thirty-plus years later and we have yet another iteration of a Batman movie hitting the big-screen. P.S. – I’ll share my thoughts on that one next week, as part of my 2022 film preview. Where was I going with this? Oh yeah. So, as part of the negotiations to get Nicholson to do Batman, he insisted that he get top billing. Over Michael Keaton…who was playing the name of the character right in the movie title. This wasn’t called Joker. It was called Batman! Anyway, Nicholson got his wish. But for A Few Good Men, the lead actor in the credits and on the poster was not Jack – it was Cruise. That’s star power.
We all know the story of the film – Cruise plays a military lawyer who (just like Top Gun’s Maverick) is chasing the memory of a dead father, desperate to please a man who will never see his achievements. He is assigned to defend two Marines for killing a fellow soldier at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, which is run by Nicholson’s Colonel Nathan Jessup. The back and forth legal machinations and twists and turns of the case (that we see often in legal dramas, but it’s still effective) are fun, especially with a top-notch cast – Demi Moore, Kevin Pollack, Kevin Bacon and Kiefer Sutherland. But the best parts of this are the two interactions between Cruise and Nicholson – the first in Cuba where the legal team starts their investigation and the fantastic courtroom showdown during the film’s climactic last sequence. If you think “Show me the money” was overused, how about “You can’t handle the truth!”? That scene was so iconic that more than twenty years later, at the height of the absurdity of “Deflategate”, we got this very creative take on a showdown between Bill Belichick and the NFL investigation team that I still can’t believe occurred – maybe I’m just bitter as a Pats fan, but we got the last laugh that year – Thanks Malcolm Butler! Wow, I really went from Tom Cruise to Malcolm Butler in writing about a legal drama. Maybe it’s time to wrap this one up. What more can you say? A Few Good Men – It never gets old, it’s the perfect popcorn movie for a Friday night and it’s my favorite Tom Cruise film.
That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed my look at one of our greatest movie stars still working today. I’ll be back next week for a preview of some of my most anticipated films of 2022. Thanks for reading and if you’d like to be notified of future posts, you can subscribe here.