Club in 2012, “but Disney took it, reshot about a third of it, and turned it into flipping the bottles and this and that.” “It was a much darker movie,” Lynch told The A.V. But even after all of those revisions, Cocktail was still watered down further during production. Screenwriter Heywood Gould, who also wrote the book, later claimed that the script went through 40 different iterations, with the film’s studio, Disney, constantly pressing to make Flanagan younger, more likable, and, ultimately, more Cruise-like. “I mean, I worked my ass off on that movie.” Again with the work ethic, Tom.ĭefenders of Cocktail have tried to couch it as a “secretly dark” look at ’80s “greed is good” culture, a depiction not far off from the eccentric barfly novel on which it is based.
“It’s painful as hell,” Cruise says of watching Cocktail in a 1990 Rolling Stone profile. Not long after Cocktail unleashed so many dubious fads on American pop culture - including two of the era’s most grating pop hits, the Beach Boys’ “Kokomo” and Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” to say nothing of acrobatic mixology - Cruise distanced himself from the film. But it never fully registered as a career triumph. Tom Cruise in Cocktail (1988) Touchstone Pictures/Getty ImagesĬocktail played a pivotal role in consolidating Cruise’s burgeoning stardom, a star vehicle built on the flimsiest of premises that grossed $78 million domestically (and another $93 million around the world), good for the ninth-best box-office haul of 1988, an achievement that could only be attributed to Cruise’s mega-watt marquee appeal. “Well,” Cruise says, flashing his trademark toothy grin, “what you see is what you get.” “Doug says you’re incredible with women - a real lady-killer,” Lynch drools near the end of Cocktail as she corners a semi-willing Cruise. (This is also a thing that happens in Cocktail.) He is, in no uncertain terms, a sex object. Women literally paw at his legs when he stands on a bar top to recite tavern-inspired poetry.
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Put another way: Everybody in this movie wants to fuck him - Shue, Lynch, even Brown, kind of. What Cocktail is really about is the desirability of Tom Cruise circa 1988. And that’s basically all you need to know. I’ll run down the essentials: Cruise plays Brian Flanagan, a wannabe business tycoon and military veteran (!) who moves to the big city in order to get rich, and then becomes a bartender at a TGI Fridays. When was the last time you watched Cocktail? Oh, you’ve never watched Cocktail? Wow … I really don’t want to spoil this one. He reacted with appropriate pathos to one of the all-time left-field suicide scenes. He resisted the string-bikini’d bod of Kelly Lynch. He rode horses on the beach with love interest Elisabeth Shue. He tossed bottles in synchronized motion with costar Bryan Brown. This is not to say that Tom Cruise sloughed off in Cocktail, one of the more popular, and least reputable, films in his oeuvre. Nothing else was required - no special effects, no elaborate cinematic universe, and certainly no broken ankles.
And people were fine with that! All it took to put butts in seats was this simple log line: Tom Cruise plays a sexy bartender. What mattered were dreams … and cocktails … Cocktails & Dreams, if you will. The mission was not impossible it was impossibly mundane. But what if he let himself lay back just a little bit and allowed the centrifugal force of his one-in-a-billion movie-star charisma propel him forward? Is it possible that this would make the longest-tenured A-list movie star since Clint Eastwood even more watchable?Īlmost 30 years ago to the day, millions of people lined up to see the latest Tom Cruise movie, and the stakes couldn’t have been lower. He’s, well, worked very hard to make it so.īut what if he didn’t work quite so hard? Not to suggest that Tom Cruise has ever coasted, exactly. That’s the one thing everyone - fans and critics alike - always says about him: Tom Cruise works hard. Elsewhere, when he’s not risking life and actual limbs in Fallout, he is doing that rigorous, purposeful Tom Cruise sprint, like Jim Fixx on a Red Bull bender.
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And then there’s the spectacular helicopter chase sequence, for which Cruise (again, of course) learned how to really pilot a helicopter. At one point, he broke his ankle after slamming into the side of a damn building-and then pulled himself up, and ran across the roof. Of course the aggressively ageless 56-year-old performs his own stunts. You’ve probably already heard the stories about Tom Cruise’s preposterous level of effort in the new Mission: Impossible-Fallout, in which he plays the role of Ethan Hunt for the sixth time in 22 years.
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