Does Tom Cruise Deserve More Respect?

You wouldn’t think of Tom Cruise as a typical manly man.  Barely an explanation for that is needed, you just fill in the description with… Tom Cruise.  And yet I have to put the case forward that when it comes to manly movies at least, there are worse offenders out there than Cruise. Repeat offenders.

There are a few reasons why Tom Cruise, if begrudgingly, deserves some respect.  The state of manly movies is not good, not only are we in the depths of comic book movie quagmire hell (more on that later), our alternatives are also not hugely appealing.

Not just girlie man shit, but really fake, impractical, toe curling nonsense.  Let me sum that up with one series and one .Gif;

The Fast and the Furious series may think itself current king of ‘alternative’ action, but let’s be honest, look at that shit.  That’s exactly the kind of thing we’re choking on.  Vin Diesel, who probably has more sway than the director, should be lobbying against that type of thing.  You won’t find many A-listers putting their foot down.

But fellow shoe-lift aficionado Tom Cruise would never have appeared in a ‘stunt’ like that, I’m sure of it.  He would have used his pull to scrap the entire set piece and film something practical.

If Tom Cruise deserves respect for nothing else, it’s doing his own stunts.  The car chase in Jack Reacher, that was obsessed over by Cruise.  The bike chase in Knight and Day (don’t watch it, the movie as a whole is crap) through the narrow streets of Seville.  Or the sword fights in The Last Samurai, where a real blade was swung in a arc one inch in front of Cruise’s neck, at his insistence.

Last year, if you ask me, Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation was everything that Fast 7 wanted to be and failed.  It was funny when it was meant to be funny and thrilling when it was meant to thrill.  Furious 7 was only funny when it was meant to be thrilling.  Remember that BMW chase in Rogue Nation?  Or the plane take off?  I do, I don’t recall much about Diesel’s exploits.  Maybe those other movies were too busy trying to reel in the ‘comic book crowd’.

Which leads me to the other point.

I just thought to myself recently, you know, Tom Cruise has never appeared in a super hero movie.  At least not the contemporary Marvel Universe, or any of DC’s main players.  He was offered Iron Man, turned it down.  I’m sure there were others.  Maybe as far back as the 1990s.

Now think about it, the guy still has major pull despite being north of 50.  But now we are 12 years+ into the quagmire of CGI-ridden Marvel figurine movies and a guy like Tom Cruise with his ego (probably?) fitting his status, hasn’t appeared in a single one.  What explanation can there be other than Tom Cruise having some sort of personal dislike for that shit?

And you know something else, Cruise has a slate of upcoming movies that offer breathing room.  While Ben Affleck is already talking about another Batman trilogy, at least Cruise is offering the likes of Mena, Jack Reacher 2, Top Gun 2 and Mission: Impossible 6.  And we can be sure there’ll be some cool, practical stunts in each.  At least with Cruise you can still smell rubber burning and know that he has insurance companies sweating bullets.

No-one is saying Tom Cruise is Arnold Schwarzenegger, however, he deserves more respect.