Are Tom Cruise and Chris McQuarrie holding each other back?
For the first 25 years of his career, Tom Cruise made it his mission to work with as many diverse, distinct, unique, and acclaimed auteurs as possible, a habit that’s fallen increasingly by the wayside.
Seeking out and collaborating with the finest filmmakers in the business did nothing to dampen his star power, either. In fact, it only served to enhance it when his star vehicles continued earning big bucks at the box office during the period he alternated his mass-marketed fare with outside-the-box performances in films hailing from the likes of Oliver Stone, Stanley Kubrick, Michael Mann, and Paul Thomas Anderson.
When he first crossed paths with Christopher McQuarrie in 2008, though, something seemed to change. From that moment on, the pair have become virtually inseparable in a professional capacity, with the Academy Award-winning writer of The Usual Suspects getting involved in almost every one of the A-lister’s projects to have arrived in the last decade and a half.
Since the release of their first feature together on The Usual Suspects director Bryan Singer’s World War II dramatic thriller Valkyrie, Cruise has appeared in a further 14 movies, including the upcoming eighth instalment of his signature Mission: Impossible franchise. Wherever he goes, McQuarrie tends to follow not too far behind.
McQuarrie has directed Cruise in Jack Reacher and Mission: Impossible sequels Rogue Nation, Fallout, Dead Reckoning, and whatever the next one ends up being called, which made him the first filmmaker to even helm more than one of the globetrotting espionage adventures.
He produced the Jack Reacher sequel Never Go Back, and received screenplay credits on sci-fi epic Edge of Tomorrow, embarrassing failure The Mummy, and spectacular legacy successor Top Gun: Maverick. That means that, based on Cruise’s aforementioned credits since 2008, the only ones that went McQuarrie-less were Knight and Day, Rock of Ages, Oblivion, and American Made.
On McQuarrie’s part, he hasn’t directed a non-Cruise flick since his underrated debut The Way of the Gun in 2000, and the only films he’s worked on since where his newfound BFF wasn’t involved were Singer’s Jack the Giant Slayer and frothy romantic caper The Tourist with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie.
They’ve clearly got a shorthand there that works in both of their best interests, but could they be holding each other back? It’s been a long time since Cruise sought to stretch himself as a dramatic performer, having spent so long focusing on his blockbuster feats of derring-do, but so far, there’s no sign of McQuarrie getting involved in his tantalising-sounding partnership with Alejandro González Iñárritu.
Meanwhile, it’s been almost a quarter of a century since McQuarrie helmed a film that didn’t have Cruise in the lead role, and someone as talented and ambitious as him surely has designs to move outside of that comfort zone. After all, he crafted the razor-sharp thrills of The Usual Suspects and his Mission: Impossible tenure has displayed an impeccable mastery of high-octane thrills, so surely he’s got the desire to branch out and make something that doesn’t feature his most famous collaborator.
Not to suggest that he’s an enabler or anything, but Cruise’s aversion to doing anything that doesn’t fit his tried-and-trusted persona has nonetheless coincided almost entirely with the McQuarrie years. It’s not like they’re churning out flops and duds left, right, and centre, but having proven themselves several times over apart; they’re in danger of morphing into a single entity that comes as a package deal that inherently imposes restrictions upon each of them by adjoining them at the hip.
Cruise has many more strings to his bow than being the death-defying action man with a shit-eating grin, just like McQuarrie has more to offer than jaw-dropping set pieces and convoluted mysteries. Perhaps it would be in the best interests of both to take a break for a little while if only to recharge those creative batteries and see if their cohabitation isn’t the co-dependency it increasingly appears to be.
