Tom Cruise is effectively at the ‘Edge of Tomorrow’
Tom Cruise keeps coming back for more.
That’s not just true in the larger sense, since the star has continued to put out lots of screen work, but also in the specific case of “Edge of Tomorrow.” The 2014 picture – which HBO shows Monday, Feb. 13, and Thursday, Feb. 16 – is a sci-fi variation on “Groundhog Day,” and if that makes it sound like a grim exercise, that’s hardly the case: Director Doug Liman (“The Bourne Identity”) wisely lets Cruise display the high-wattage charisma that has kept his career extremely fruitful.
He plays a military man, but not one who’s used to being in battle. He’s a public-relations chief who uses his charm just as smoothly as Cruise’s Jerry Maguire to stay out of real trouble, but his luck runs out when alien forces invade Earth and he’s sent to the front lines.
That’s not for long, though, it would appear initially. The Cruise character is killed just about as quickly as he hits the shoreline, in a sequence meant to evoke thoughts of D-day. However, he revives to find himself right back in exactly the same situation – over and over – since a time warp sends him back to the moment his mortality ends, time and again.
Once he catches on to what’s happening, he starts getting a little better at his mission each time. The irony is not lost that our hero has to keep getting killed in order to learn his job, but it plays pretty well.
However, “Edge of Tomorrow” isn’t a movie that belongs only to Cruise. In a very big way, it also scores well for Emily Blunt, who is simply great as an expert soldier whose skills come in very handy for Cruise. The actress often has shown a certain edge in her characters, certainly dating back to her work in “The Devil Wears Prada,” and she gets to give them bountifully evident use here.
For any familiar tropes that “Edge of Tomorrow” falls back on – -and there are a lot of them, from the “Groundhog Day” concept to the alien-invasion premise – it also offers a lot that’s commendably fresh. That result owes a lot to Tom Cruise, who was able to demonstrate again here (and who certainly reaffirmed it most recently in “Top Gun: Maverick”) that he’s not out of the game yet.