By 
WHAT IS TOM CRUISE running from? Fair question, you might say. The 62-year-old actor is a man perpetually in motion, so much so he’s effectively become a flesh and blood meme. His is a career that seems like it was shot out of a cannon and Cruise, you suspect, is not someone who chooses to look back. Similarly, he likely doesn’t have much time for public introspection. The question he would surely prefer to answer, is what is he running toward?
The answer is us, the audience. Cruise is on a mission – one he chose, very deliberately, to accept years ago – to save cinema and by extension, us, from the onslaught of comic-book franchise fare and the CGI ejaculations that characterise much of studio output these days. Instead, he remains fabulously old school, charting a course that prioritises nuts and bolts filmmaking, authenticity and, most famously, a ropes-and-cables approach to stunt work largely undertaken by the man himself.
You’d have to say, given the box-office returns he’s posted over the course of his career, that Cruise has overwhelmingly succeeded in his mission. Among the top 10 most successful actors of all time in terms of box office gross, Cruise sits at no. 7. But it’s worth noting that every other actor on that list has made it there courtesy of ensemble franchise fare, such as Samuel Jackson and Robert Downey Jnr., at number one and three, respectively, largely thanks to their work in the Marvel universe. Cruise, who’s famously refused to pull on the spandex for a superhero role, has done it by himself, largely through sheer force of personality and a unfathonable work ethic. Nobody in the history of cinema can put bums on seats like Thomas Mapother IV.
Indeed, along with Leo, Brad, and the other Tom, (Hanks), Cruise may be our last great movie star. If you’ve only really come to Cruise over the last decade or so, you might be surprised by the breadth of his body of work. There was a period from the late ’80s to the early aughts where the actor made a concerted push for critical acclaim, working with a string of auteur directors on interesting and thought-provoking movies. Was he Oscar-chasing? You bet he was.
But after 2005, and that infamous couch-jumping episode with Oprah, Cruise has largely eschewed working with acclaimed directors on serious projects, instead choosing to focus, with one or two exceptions, on popcorn fare and pulling off death-defying stunts. There is talk that after putting the Mission Impossible franchise to bed, Cruise will make another Top Gun sequel, and then perhaps return to flexing his acting chops rather than putting his body on the line. We’ll believe it when we see it.
For now, let’s look back at a career that straddles both box-office glory and critical acclaim, a rare feat indeed. Here are Tom Cruise’s top 20 films, ranked.
20 Knight and Day
Possibly the most criminally underated movie in Cruise’s canon, this 2010 action comedy achieves something Cruise has struggled with throughout his career: chemistry with his female co-star, Cameron Diaz. Dialogue between the pair crackles as the two negotiate cartoonish action sequences. Cruise leans into his established Ethan Hunt spy persona but this time with a decided twinkle in his eye. He gets the joke; though given the film’s middling reception, critics and the public may not have.
19 Tropic Thunder
Possibly the most ambitious role in his career – which some would argue isn’t saying an awful lot – Cruise needed to win back the previously adoring public after the Oprah fiasco and a series of increasingly weird Scientology-driven rants. As the vulgar assistant-eating studio executive, Les Grossman, Cruise makes Entourage’s Ari Gold seem like a shrinking violet, happily chewing scenery in Ben Stiller’s satirical comedy. The movie, it must be said, has aged like vinegar, treading on PC sensibilities with abandon. But unlike some of the movie’s more questionable gags, Grossman’s iconic closing-credits office dance moves never get old.
18 Interview with the Vampire
Based on the Anne Rice novel, the pre-internet public reaction to Cruise playing bloodsucker, Lestat, was savage. Rice herself railed against the casting, only to walk it back once she saw the film. In what could have been a campy romp, Cruise manages to sink his teeth (yes, pun intended) into the restlessness of an immortal malcontent, while embracing the romantic subtext with Brad Pitt’s Louis. Seeing these two Hollywood heavyweights share the screen is on the level of Redford and Newman or Pacino and De Niro, both giving the other space to shine, or brood, as the case may be.
17 War of the Worlds
Cruise made his name playing douchebags with daddy issues, so it was interesting to see him play a father, in this epic survival tale infused with a post 9-11 pall of fear and hysteria. The film marked the second collaboration, after Minority Report, for Spielberg and Cruise, two Hollywood titans who had both struggled to win critical acclaim earlier in their careers. That their two films together should weave deeper, contemplative themes into ostensibly popcorn vehicles perhaps betrays something of that earlier struggle to be taken seriously.
16 Top Gun: Maverick
Probably the most successful legacy sequel of all time, this one manages to be both an homage to the original without being a complete retread, though, it does owe a sizeable debt to Star Wars: A New Hope, particularly in the final set piece. Director Joseph Kosinski keeps a tight leash on proceedings, leaning into granular practical effects to bring dazzling aerial combat sequences to life. Cruise’s lion-in-winter turn as Maverick is understated, a far cry from the cocksure, emotionally brittle alpha-dog of the first film.
15 The Color of Money
Working with luminaries, Newman and Scorsese, this was Cruise’s first bite at more serious fare. A sequel, of sorts, to Newman’s 1961 film, The Hustler, it’s interesting now to watch the passing of the torch that’s occurring on screen between one of the kings of cinema’s golden age and Cruise, his heir apparent. Hotshot Vince, is a deliberately annoying foil to Newman’s Fast Eddie Felson, marking the beginning of an era in the late ’80s when Cruise was willing to subvert his pin-up image to play unlikeable characters.
14 The Outsiders
Director Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 adaptation of the seminal book by S.E. Hinton was a cattle call for a host of stars who would come to define the decade, including Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio, Emilio Estevez and the brightest of all, Cruise. To be honest, a pre-dental work Cruise doesn’t have a great deal to do as the cocky Steve Randle, but Coppola and his posse of would-be players do a tremendous job of capturing life as hot-headed hoodlums in 1960s Oklahoma.
13 Edge of Tomorrow
Probably the best film of Cruise’s rather bereft – by his standards – 2010s, Edge of Tomorrow is a terrific sci-fi action flick that manages to be thoughtful and contemplative while also packing a comic punch. Cruise has great chemistry with co-star Emily Blunt, as the pair negotiate some loopy time-bending plot mechanics – it’s great to see an actor as bulletproof and sometimes dumbly heroic as Cruise, playing a coward.
12 Mission: Impossible
The film that launched the franchise that has kept Cruise relevant and a bankable box office draw in the latter half of his career, Ethan Hunt’s first outing is distinguished by marrying the actor’s All-American persona with the subversive hand of director Brian De Palma. The result is a crafty, thrilling, if slightly over-complicated blockbuster with a brain.
11 Eyes Wide Shut
This might be the most successful and enduring large scale creative failure ever made. A fever dream about marital malaise, midlife angst, jealousy and sexual possibility, the 400-day, 100-plus-take-per-scene shoot that the late Stanley Kubrick subjected Cruise and then-wife Nicole Kidman to, was enough to wreck their marriage. Cruise, as Dr. Bill, is difficult to root for as he descends into a jealous spiral on a long New York night, an ill-fated quest that’s meandering, sometimes silly – the orgy scenes border on farce – occasionally beguiling and often decidedly odd. In retrospect he and the missus should have got drunk and fucked instead of smoking pot and getting paranoid.
10 Minority Report
Spielberg and Cruise’s first collab, this delightful sci-fi neo-noir, is both a propulsive thriller and a ruminative depiction of a dystopian future that has some fun B-movie flourishes. Cruise’s John Anderton is a tragic, complex figure, which together with his performance in Vanilla Sky and Magnolia’s T.J. Mackey, marks what we can perhaps label the actor’s post-Millenium ‘dark period’.
9 Mission: Impossible – Fallout
By many critics’ reckoning the best of the Mission: Impossible films to date – we are yet to see Final Reckoning. Working with frequent collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, the action and stunts are ratcheted up to unprecedented levels, while allowing audiences a rare peak inside Ethan Hunt’s head, a move that certainly helps raise the emotional stakes. A gripping, unrelenting action tour de force, Fallout is up there with the Bourne movies and Skyfall as the best in the spy-action genre.
8 Collateral
Trust Michael Mann to cast Cruise as a villain, in what would turn out to be one of the actor’s very best roles. With grey hair and a cold, stark magnetism, hitman Vincent is a calculating and manipulative psychopath, but one that hints at depths we will never be able to access. The quintessential LA crime story – in an anonymous, soul-deadened neon nightscape, amoral monsters like Vincent are free to prey. You leave the cinema with a little less faith in humanity . . . and the suspicion that Cruise should have played more villains.
7 Born on the Fourth of July
Cruise has largely eschewed overtly political films throughout his career and his work here makes you wonder why. Directed by Oliver Stone, Cruise’s Ron Kovic goes from an eager young patriot to a disabled and disillusioned vet in a dramatic arc he would only ever approach again in Magnolia.
6 Rain Man
The only Best Picture winner in his oeuvre, Cruise is terrific playing yuppie asshole, Charlie Babbit, who’s transporting his autistic brother Raymond (played by Dustin Hoffman in an Oscar-winning role) across the country. The film packs an emotional punch as Charlie’s animosity toward his brother slowly and inevitably thaws. Looking back now, the movie shapes as Cruise’s first grown-up role.
5 Magnolia
After two previous Oscar nominations, Cruise left it all on the table playing Frank T.J. Mackey, a misogynistic self-help guru (and a forerunner to the likes of Andrew Tate), in a performance of staggering emotional range. Truly, the Mackey we meet ordering his disciples to “respect the cock” and “tame the cunt” to the one searching for catharsis and closure with his dying father in the film’s final act (before the frogs fall from the sky) shows an actor at the top of his game. Alas, the gong would elude him.
4 Top Gun
If Risky Business (see below) was his launching pad, Top Gun was the movie that launched Cruise into the stratosphere. Cocky, arrogant and self-righteous, Cruise’s Maverick is an OTT performance in a testosterone-fuelled romp befitting of the decade. Indeed, this deliciously irony-free confection is now renown as much for the campy, homoerotic preening of its young, buff cast as it is for its sublime aerial action sequences, meaning it largely plays as side-splitting comedy for modern audiences. The greased-up volleyball scene and white-towelled locker room posturing remain high-water marks in unironic ’80s buffoonery.
3 Risky Business
The film that catapulted Cruise to stardom, beginning with that iconic underwear scene. In the middle-class Chicago ‘burbs in which so many ’80s teen dramas would be set, Cruise is the gloriously-named Joel Goodson, in a vulnerable and relatable performance that channels the pressures and shame of teenage sexuality. But what could have been a hackneyed teen trope-fest is transformed by Cruise’s ability to always keep one self-aware eyebrow arched at the camera. In a 40-plus year career, he’s rarely been better.
2 A Few Good Men
If we were judging Cruise’s output by sheer quotability, this 1992 navy procedural drama would win hands down. “You can’t handle the truth” is but one of a handful of lines written by dialogue wizard, Aaron Sorkin, that pop culture devoured (and got indigestion from) back in the ’90s. Some say Jack Nicholson, who plays Colonel Nathan Jessep and won the Best Supporting Actor award, steals the show, yet his combustible scenes only work because Cruise is able to trade punches and hold his own with the Hollywood legend. To be honest, with its precise plotting and zippy dialogue, the film is a dramatic showcase for all involved, not least, Cruise.
1 Jerry Maguire
Who new Tom Cruise playing a regular human being would make for the role of his career? Funny, emotional and ultimately heartwarming, the film tracks the quarter-life crisis of Jerry, a commitment-phobic sports agent who’s afraid of emotional intimacy and allergic to vulnerability, in a role that hints at the elusiveness of Cruise’s private persona. It’s perhaps what makes the moment when Cruise finally bares his soul, such a satisfying emotional pay-off. “You complete me”, says Jerry in the film’s climatic scene. In navigating the vast contours of the role, it may have capped Cruise’s career, too.
Related:
Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible stunts are a bone-breaking ode to old school Hollywood
