Action replay: Why Tom Cruise is contemporary cinema’s Peter Pan

According to Box Office Mojo, Tom Cruise’s films as an actor have grossed an astonishing $4,446,011,914 in the US and Canada alone. That figure doesn’t take into consideration the many hundreds of millions of dollars these films have earned elsewhere, or the films he produced but didn’t appear in. The tally is bound to continue rising. The one-man cash register will be back on our screens in Top Gun: Maverick next year and has two more Mission Impossible movies in the pipeline.

What is most startling about Cruise isn’t just his longevity in a business that generally favours youth. It’s the fact that, at the age of 57, he continues to play the same action roles as when he was first on screen, more than 30 years ago. His face is a little more lined and he is more thickset than when he made Top Gun in 1986, but the energy, the wraparound smile and the physicality are all undiminished. It’s instructive to compare him with his brat pack co-stars in Francis Ford Coppola’s teen rebel movie, The Outsiders (1983), one of his breakthrough films. At the time, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze and Rob Lowe were bigger names, but he has outlasted them all. Over four decades, his status has hardly diminished at all. What is less clear, though, is how far he has evolved as an actor.

Cruise isn’t just the biggest star of his era. He is the most elusive and paradoxical. Ever since the start of his career, he has managed to seem both rebellious and conformist, ingratiating and sometimes very creepy. He is the clean-cut, all-American who has given some of his best performances playing delinquents and outsiders. Everyone thinks they know him and yet he gives little away. Like the sports agent he portrayed in Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire (1996), he has the knack of seeming high minded and unscrupulous at the same time. He doesn’t seem to have much versatility as an actor, but he has appeared in a huge variety of movies. He has done teen comedy (Risky Business), gothic romance (Interview with the Vampire), sports films (The Color of Money), hard-boiled crime thrillers (Collateral), sci-fi (The War of the Worlds), character-driven ensemble pieces (Magnolia), and dramas based around autism (Rain Man). He is known as a control freak who takes over the movies he works on, and yet, he has collaborated with many of the most powerful directors in Hollywood (Oliver Stone, Michael Mann, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg among them).

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On the one hand, he is the victim of his own bland, epicene good looks (he doesn’t get many of the character parts that win actors awards) but, on the other, he has sustained a career as a leading man for four decades. Depending on your vantage point, he is either the most gracious and accessible A-list star imaginable or an intimidating and arrogant figure who bullies those who cross him. He’ll spend hours patiently meeting fans and signing autographs at red carpet premieres. He is genial and outgoing on most chat shows. Collaborators from director Doug Liman to British actor Simon Pegg talk of his professionalism and generosity. However, he is also defensive and antagonistic whenever his affiliation to the Church of Scientology is broached or his private life is raked over. It is hard to reconcile the affable American everyman with the figure satirised by South Park and shown up in a sinister light in Lawrence Wright’s 2015 book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief.

The 20th anniversary re-release this month of one of Cruise’s least characteristic films, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), is a timely moment to look back on Cruise’s career. Kubrick took a perverse pleasure in casting him against type. The celebrated movie star played Bill Harford, a neurotic, voyeuristic doctor, consumed with sexual jealousy and unable to take charge of anything in his life.

There is a moment in the movie in which the doctor takes a taxi to the gates of a country house and then asks the driver to wait as he disappears inside for a masked orgy. Hollywood studio executives must have been as exasperated as the taxi driver. The meter was running. Kubrick had taken Cruise out of circulation for a small eternity at a time when his services were worth a fortune to them. However, the director had also given the star a gilt-edged chance to re-invent himself – to escape the world of Risky Business and Top Gun once and for all. His role as the doctor was akin to that played by James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Harford is fretting that his wife might have cheated on him. He is in search of erotic adventure himself but is continually frustrated and humiliated. He misreads signs. Sinister forces are pitted against him. Death accompanies him wherever he goes.

Cruise gives a typically strong and intelligent performance in Eyes Wide Shut without really capturing the sexual anxiety or psychological torment of his character. Even at the most fraught moments, you still think that he is in control – that there is a Jack Reacher-like type lurking within him and ready to step up. In one scene, drunken hooligans barge into him on the street and yell homophobic insults at him. Cruise looks as if he is exercising enormous restraint in not lashing out at them. As an audience, we know that he could take them all down if wanted to. We’ve seen him in Mission Impossible. There is a sense throughout that he has gone undercover and is only playing at being weak and diffident.

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Eyes Wide Shut didn’t turn out to be the watershed in Cruise’s career that might have been anticipated. Having fulfilled his obligation to Kubrick, the actor returned to the Hollywood mainstream as if he had never been away. Since Eyes Wide Shut, he has become associated with rip-roaring action movies. The Ethan Hunt and Jack Reacher films have eclipsed almost all his other work and it has sometimes appeared that his range is very limited as a result. At their worst, these movies have been as much like glorified theme park rides as the superhero films that Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and others have attacked as anti-cinema in recent weeks. “The eerie thing about Cruise’s career in the last decade is that he has been churning out the cinematic equivalent of holograms. It walks like a Tom Cruise movie, it talks like a Tom Cruise movie (it’s got speed and intensity, even a soupçon of cleverness), but it’s a Tom Cruise movie that leaves no shadow. It’s a piece of virtual entertainment,” Variety’s Owen Gleiberman wrote dismissively of him in 2017 in an article entitled “A Star in Slow Motion Career Meltdown”, after the failure of The Mummy (2017).

Cruise, though, is nothing if not resilient. Whenever his films have failed, he has always bounced straight up from the canvas. A few months after the debacle of The Mummy, Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018) received glowing reviews and earned a fortune at the box office.

Like Peter Pan, Cruise absolutely refuses to grow old. Will he still be jumping out of planes and performing his own stunts on motorbikes in action movies when he is in his 60s? Judging by the trailer for the new Top Gun film (“you won’t retire and despite your best efforts, you refuse to die!”) that is exactly what he is planning. At times, it’s as if his career has progressed in a back-to-front, Benjamin Button-like way. Whereas other actors do the big blockbuster movies when they’re in their prime and then turn to more offbeat, adventurous character parts, Cruise in his Fifties had gravitated closer and closer to the mainstream. It’s a pity that Kubrick is no longer around to yank him out of his comfort zone.

‘Eyes Wide Shut’ is re-released in selected cinemas across the UK from 29 November; ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ is released next summer