Tom Cruise? He’s plane crazy
These days he’s more likely to embrace a hunk of flying metal than a leading lady, says
In every one of the six Tom Cruise films released in the past four years, our hero has found himself in trouble on a plane. In this month’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout, he leaps out of one at 25,000ft, and in its immediate predecessor, Rogue Nation, clung to an Airbus’s hull during take-off. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back featured a fight on a passenger jet; The Mummy had an anti-gravity nosedive. Edge of Tomorrow saw Cruise bailing out of an exploding gunship, then twisting through the sky on the end of a zip line. And the drug-smuggling thriller American Made was almost nothing but airborne derring-do: its standout sequence involved Cruise crashlanding a cocaine-packed Piper Aerostar on a suburban avenue in order to evade US Customs.
Plane craziness has become a Cruise trademark. The statistics bear it out: this absurdly handsome actor last played a romantic lead 17 years ago, in the sciencefiction thriller Vanilla Sky. Since then, he has flirted with Cameron Diaz on a red motorcycle in the action comedy Knight and Day and saved the world alongside various actionmovie damsels. But the age of Tom Cruise as a sex symbol — as seen in Risky Business, Cocktail, Far and Away and Eyes Wide Shut — is long gone.
It’s not hard to pinpoint when and where the flame spluttered out: May 2005, when he jumped on Oprah Winfrey’s sofa during an interview for War of the Worlds that became a grand unveiling of his then-girlfriend, and now ex-wife, Katie Holmes. The clip went viral and, effectively, a single talk-show episode had destabilised two decades of stardom.
So here is what Cruise did. Meme culture — the viral spread of (usually humorous) images, videos and phrases online — had undone Cruise’s career. To fight back, he turned himself into a meme: the eccentric film star who doesn’t know when to stop. His first post-sofa role was an extraordinarily odd choice: in the Ben Stiller comedy Tropic Thunder, he played the toxic Hollywood executive Les Grossman under a welter of prosthetics. The part hardly played to his strengths — Cruise is no comedian. But its extreme tastelessness and craziness had viral appeal. The same applied to his against-type turn as a famous rock star in the musical Rock of Ages. His famously lengthy red carpet meetand-greets evolved into a general determination to go further than anyone else in the name of entertainment.
Hence the planes. As completely asexual demonstrations of movie-star potency go, they’re just about perfect, and have a viral currency that lives outside whatever film they appear in, whether it’s a smash or a dud. Cruise may have turned 56 three weeks ago, but you can’t watch these scenes without thinking he’s still got it.
Hence the current status of Cruise’s career. Since audiences can’t see him as anyone other than Tom Cruise for the time being, he’s decided to run with it.
For now, Cruise only cares about his chemistry with one person: you.