Is ‘Cocktail’ Tom Cruise’s worst movie?
Is it worse for a movie to be bad or forgettable? It’s an endless debate of cinema that has no real answer, but the trajectory of Tom Cruise‘s career over the last two decades has made it patently clear that he’s actively trying to avoid them both as much as humanly possible.
Long gone are the days when he’d regularly be found going out of his way to collaborate with the biggest, best, and brightest directors in the industry; such is the way the Cruise machine has evolved to make him the single biggest driving force behind every single one of his crowd-pleasing projects.
Obviously, nobody is immune from the odd stinker or two, but looking back at the never-ending ‘bad vs. forgettable’ debate, two of his recent titles stand out as the embodiment of both. The Mummy saw Cruise shoehorn his way into a position of creative power on a blockbuster intended to launch an entire shared universe, which ended up going down in infamy and taking a pummelling from anyone unfortunate enough to witness it with their own two eyes and yet it still earned north of $400million at the box office because he was in it.
Conversely, remember Lions for Lambs? Anybody? Believe it or not, it was a drama directed by and starring Robert Redford alongside Cruise and Meryl Streep, a heavyweight trio, if ever there was one. Greeted with a shrug of indifference, the superstar’s presidential candidate opens the door for Streep’s journalist to uncover the story of a lifetime. In what’s almost definitely not a coincidence, Cruise has never made a straightforward dramatic picture ever since, with his presence being relied on to shift tickets as the brand began to establish dominance over his career.
On the plus side, he did get the worst movie of his entire career out of the way relatively early, but because it arrived in cinemas immediately after Top Gun and The Color of Money, the risible Cocktail still conspired to recoup its production budget almost nine times over, despite going on to win a Golden Raspberry Award for ‘Worst Picture’ that was completely justified and well-merited.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Cruise conceded that it “was not a crowning jewel” of his on-screen accomplishments, which, if anything, is dramatically underselling it. Brash hotshot Brian Flanagan wants to get into the marketing business and embrace the yuppie lifestyle, but he can’t do it without a degree.
Working as a bartender to make ends meet and pay for his tuition, a falling-out with his boss causes him to flee to Jamaica and open his own watering hole, where he falls in with Elisabeth Shue’s artist Jordan Mooney. With a screenplay that feels as though it was written by a long-serving bartender to live out their wildest flights of fancy, not even Cruise’s undeniable star power could salvage a flaming dumpster fire of dramatic inertia, romantic placidity, and self-serving hubris.
About as shallow as the water lapping the sun-kissed beaches of Flanagan’s Jamaican bolthole, Cocktail is also exponentially cornier than the fields Christopher Nolan planted to aid the realism of Interstellar. It might work as a wish-fulfilment exercise for anybody who works – or has worked – in the service industry, but as a work of cinema, it’s an inane love story that doubles as an extended beer commercial, all wrapped in a poorly scripted shambles that leans far too hard on Cruise’s charisma to salvage the unsalvageable.
Cruise doesn’t make abjectly terrible movies very often, which may have a lot to do with his own dismissive opinion of Cocktail, one he’s harboured for going on 40 years. The Mummy is dire without a shadow of a doubt, but there’s something fascinating about just how cack-handed it was in conception and execution, which by extension gives it a curiosity factor Cocktail couldn’t possibly hope to attain.
It’s just a very uninteresting, laboriously stilted, and remarkably twee tale of a cocky upstart getting everything he wants by the time the credits come up, with no real drama, stakes, or conflict raised along the way. Missing the mark by miles isn’t regularly associated with the leading man’s career, but never have things sailed as wide of the goalposts as they did with Cocktail.
