The new Tom Cruise movie, “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” is nearly as exhausting to watch as it must have been to make. Mr. Cruise famously does his own stunts, one of the movie’s biggest selling points. But it’s hard to suspend disbelief watching a picture when you’re thinking about how much Tiger Balm went into its making. Is it possible Mr. Cruise and audiences alike would be better off if he didn’t go quite so hard? You can admire his stamina at 62, but a movie shouldn’t make you feel like you’ve been cornered at a party by a guy who can’t stop telling you how freaking amped he is.
“Final Reckoning” — even the full title is taxing — is a movie so big, it has by my count both three MacGuffins and three set pieces with nuclear bombs that need to be disarmed before their timers go off. (Dayenu, as Jews sing at Passover; a single such blessing, or cliché, would have been enough.) We get to see Mr. Cruise dangle off not one but two biplanes and sprint back and forth across the streets of London with arms pumping manfully when he could have taken an Uber. For several scenes in which the necessities of plot and beefcake delivery force him to strip down to his boxer briefs, we also get to marvel at his perfectly toned senior body, which would be the envy at any recreational facility, not just the pickleball courts at the Villages.
All movie stars, from Mary Pickford to Margot Robbie, are brands, as familiar and comforting in their way as Coke or Irish Spring, and almost as consistent. But Mr. Cruise, an A-lister across five decades now, has transcended even that exalted status. He’s become a genre unto himself, his movies akin to pornography in the sense that they trade not in illusion but in physical, bodily reality. He doesn’t so much act as endure, his stardom adjacent to martyrdom.
“It’s actually hard to breathe,” he recently explained to People magazine, discussing the finer points of hanging off a biplane wing. “You’re so tired. Your eyesight’s blurry. There were times that I didn’t have the energy to get from the wing back into the cockpit, and I would have to almost fall asleep and wait till I had the energy to crawl back because we couldn’t land if I was on the wing. We landed, and I was so cold I couldn’t walk.”
Mr. Cruise’s willingness to climb aboard real jet fighters, and subject his handsome face to unflattering G-forces, helped “Top Gun: Maverick” gross $1.5 billion worldwide in 2022 and return audiences to theaters postpandemic. The actor was widely credited with saving “Hollywood’s ass,” to quote (reportedly) Steven Spielberg. But how many things — movies, the world, his public image following its couch-jumping, Brooke Shields-hectoring nadir in the mid-2000s — does he have to save now that he’s nearly eligible for Medicare?
When he’s not sprinting or dangling, Mr. Cruise can be a terrific actor, gifted with both talent and charisma, which you can see on display in films as varied as “Born of the Fourth of July,” “A Few Good Men,” “Jerry Maguire” and “Magnolia” (all made in the 20th century). Appearing in teen movies at the start of his career, he stood out as a minor character even among the loaded cast of “The Outsiders.” In “Risky Business” his charm not only held the screen’s center but also transformed what could have been a sour, New Hollywood-style satire of the American way into a rollicking Reagan-era salute to entrepreneurship. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing thematically, but it made Mr. Cruise a star.
His performances in those early films felt effortless, which of course is an illusion — I don’t mean to slight his hard work and dedication to craft. But Mr. Cruise’s late period is more and more effortful. It’s been nearly a decade since “American Made,” the 2017 film based on a true story in which he played a boyishly likable pilot who ended up running drugs for the C.I.A. — not a stretch as Cruise parts go, but the last picture in his filmography that didn’t entirely depend on his risking a shattered femur or a dented skull for our gawking entertainment.
I washed out of a brief and unheralded career as a TV writer back in the 1990s, so I am not the best person to be a Hollywood career counselor. As a fan, however, I wish Mr. Cruise would ease up a bit, stop pushing himself so hard physically, because his stunt work risks curdling from spectacle into shtick. It’s OK to remain inside an aircraft.
Older pop stars sometimes choose to give up on having contemporary hits and gravitate toward more age-appropriate genres, like acoustic blues or Great American Songbook collections. I’m not suggesting Mr. Cruise take codger roles, like Tom Hanks does now (though I bet Mr. Cruise could have been a winningly loathsome Colonel Parker in “Elvis”), but how about something less exhibitionist, maybe a tartly written dramedy or a nasty little psychological thriller or an outrageous comic cameo like the one he made in “Tropic Thunder”? Or even an action movie with a little less huffing and grunting and a little more coherence? Something where he doesn’t ask us to watch him suffer quite so much and we can be anxious for the character, not the performer.
Mr. Cruise’s next film is an untitled project with the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who previously made “Birdman” and “The Revenant,” films that trade in differing forms of endurance. Asked about stunts in the new picture, Iñárritu told Deadline that there’s “nothing of that,” though reports suggest that the world will once again be at stake. Meanwhile, rumor has it that a third “Top Gun” movie is in the works, which would mean more jets and G-forces and, for the requisite shirtless beach party scene, more strenuous ab work. Pass the Coppertone and strap in.
Bruce Handy is the author of “Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies” and “Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Books as an Adult.” He has also written several picture books, most recently “There Was a Shadow,” illustrated by Lisk Feng.
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