TOP 5 TOM CRUISE MOVIES (RANKED)

I appreciate the guy is not everyone's cup of CalMag but as he's featured in two of my posts this week, it's got me thinking about my top 5 Tom Cruise movies of all time. Still hoping to write a remake of Frankenheimer's 'Seconds', King Vidor's 'The Fountainhead' for the crazy bastard and, who knows, maybe throw in a musical version of 'Battlefield Earth' just for the hell of it.

Just kidding, Tom! Don't send Miscavage after me.  

5. The Color Of Money (1985)

In this 1985 sequel to Robert Rossen's classic movie 'The Hustler' (1961) Paul Newman gives his greatest-ever screen performance and not surprisingly, it was the first and only film he ever won an Oscar for. Tom Cruise (still green post 'Risky Business') plays his part in assisting Newman's greatness by acting as the perfect foil to his aging Fast Eddie Felson (from 'The Hustler') and is perfect at playing the cocky, goading post-adolescent, a character type he riffs on variations of later in 'Top Gun' (1986) and 'Cocktail' (1988), both early Cruise classics.

What's beautiful about watching the two stars together in 'Color' is that Newman gets to see a mirror reflection of his younger self portrayed in Vincent (Tom Cruise) as he now has to contend with being the older man no longer able to get away with the advantages of youth that he had in the earlier Rossen film. The fact that Vincent can sense Eddie's vulnerability gives him a certain advantage over the aging hustler who has to use his street smarts to wrest back a certain degree of power. In this sense Eddie and Vincent are like rivals but also a bit like father and son. Echoes of Howard Hawks's 'Red River' (1948) with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift come to mind as they both share a similar rivalry in that iconic western to Newman and Cruise in Scorsese's underrated pool hall classic.

4. Collateral (2004)

Cruise refines and improves upon DeNiro's role of Neil McCauley in Michael Mann's 'Heat' (1995) by creating an even more clinical, detached and colder criminal character in the same director's 'Collateral' (2004). Vincent (no, not the same one as 'Color') is a cold-blooded assassin and just like a shark in his ruthless approach to killing his targets as he moves through the night like those predators of the deep. Sitting in the back of Jamie Foxx's taxi cab for a considerable duration of the film he uses the innocent stooge as a front for carrying out his itinerary of murderous tasks.  

There's a deadness of the soul to Cruise's performance which seems especially noticeable when you think how emotional and reactive many of his previous characters on screen were up until this point. The uneasy but brilliant chemistry between Cruise and Foxx in this 'anti-buddy' movie makes this feature of Vincent's muted, psycho-zen character even more noticeable.  

If I were a taxi driver I would certainly think twice about who to let in my cab after watching 'Collateral'.

3. Top Gun Maverick (2022)

The symbiotic alignment between Cruise's mission to save Hollywood and his characters on screen now reaches its peak in this insanely beat-perfect blockbuster sequel to 1986's 'Top Gun'. This is more than just some meta exercise in paying lip service to fans of the original movie but more an evolution in how to improve upon, what to my mind, was a distinctly average film using the pressure and weight of time. Perhaps it was the death of 'Top Gun' director Tony Scott that upped the emotional stakes for Cruise and Co to get the sequel to the late director's iconic film just right or maybe it was just that elusive lightning-in-a-bottle moment where Cruise and the character of Maverick become so inseparable that half the work was done just by him simply showing up.

But I believe the film's success was much more than that.

Coming out of the Covid pandemic and having audiences return to cinemas once again, there was something transcendent about this thrilling reminder of the basic, thrill-seeking essence of why we go to movies in the first place and that, combined with Cruise's daredevil defiance, was as close to touching the illusion of freedom as one could hope for in a post-lockdown world.

One scene in particular was especially moving where Maverick visits his old friend Iceman (Val Kilmer) who has clearly suffered more than Cruise from the ravages of time. When Iceman reminds Maverick that it's time to let go, we know that line means as much to Cruise the movie actor as Maverick the pilot.

Neither can accept growing old even when mortality is staring them in the face.

2. Rain Man (1988)

It was inevitable that the cocky, smug, entitled Tom Cruise of 'The Color Of Money', 'Cocktail' and 'Top Gun' would eventually have to either break or evolve somehow and in Barry Levinson's 1988 classic movie 'Rain Man' he did both those two things. Watching this film in 2023, I find something refreshing in the relentless selfishness of Charlie Babbitt who starts out angry and desperate to win back what he feels he's owed from his late father's inheritance. The fact it takes him so long into the movie running time to show any real heart proves that character writing in mainstream Hollywood has seriously dumbed down since 1988.

And although Dustin Hoffmann predictably won best actor for his performance of the autistic savant, Raymond Babbit, it's actually Cruise who has to do all the real heavy lifting, responding to Hoffmann's deliberately mono performance with the full spectrum of emotions from irritation, frustration, anger, jealousy and eventually understanding and compassion for himself as much as his disabled brother.

It really is an acting masterclass and could have easily been at the top of my list as Cruise's best. But in a career that's now spanned forty years up on the big screen, there was even one even better performance yet to come that I believe deserves top spot.  

1. Jerry Maguire (1997)

Cameron Crowe's 'Jerry Maguire' shows Cruise at his most versatile where he uses his entire box of actorly tricks to bring to the story of a sports agent who decides to grow a conscience and loses his job and his clients as a consequence of his change of heart. I can imagine along with those who work in banks and high finance, sports agents are pretty low down the list of characters one might relate to but that is the genius of Tom Cruise's performance as Jerry Maguire that he makes us care for this corporate suit gone rogue. The film itself is a delight and although some scenes could have done with a bit of trimming here and there, the cumulative effect of the film emotionally is near perfect.

Cruise has so many different characters to share scenes with it's a marvel to see him paint with so many different colours for an actor often accused by snobby critics of being a little one-note at times. His scenes with young child actor Jonathan Lipnick playing the role of six-year-old Ray are priceless as are his combative scenes with Cuba Gooding Jr playing the American football player Rod Tidwell the only remaining client on his books. But perhaps it's the tenderness and awkwardness of his scenes with his partner Dorothy, played by Renee Zellweger, that brings out the most humanity of Cruise's performance in the film overall.

In perhaps the second most famous scene in the film after the endlessly quoted 'show me the money' scene is the one near the end of the film where Jerry Maguire interrupts a man-hating woman's group in order to re-declare his love for Dorothy, his wife, whose sister Laurel (Bonnie Hunt) has organized the group meeting that's taking place. What's even better than the classic 'you complete me' line is the way Jerry quotes his original mission statement (the very same mission statement which brought about his career downfall) to win back the love of his life. A perfect resolution to the unresolution at the start of the film. It's not just Jerry and Dorothy that are completed by the end of this scene but the entire ethos of the movie itself which suggests that it's better to stick to your principles than sell out as you'll be rewarded with the greater riches of life: friendship, love and happiness.

Strangely Crowe hasn't made a decent movie since 'Maguire' proving that Cruise is made of different stuff, never faltering to scale the heights of greatness with his ambitions in commercial film making.

Must be something to do with all those Scientology TRs. ;-)

Bonus Ball - 'Minority Report'

Although I couldn't quite justify putting Tom's performance in Spielberg's dystopian Sci-Fi classic from 2002 in my top 5, it would easily be number 6 if only for the amazing opening scene set in a futuristic police department where Cruise sifts through endless projected images for crimes that have yet to be committed. Standing like some great symphony conductor while Schubert's 'Unfinished' Symphony plays throughout the scene, it's a moment of perfect cinematic choreography between Spielberg and Cruise and I love how they just do it with absolutely no self-consciousness whatsoever. I think it's this headstrong attitude of executing an approach to these iconic film sequences that makes Cruise a deceptively smart actor and why it's perhaps easy for many to overlook the brilliance of his craft.