“What the fuck is that?”: Tom Cruise’s reaction to the worst movie of his career
Such is his devotion to his current role as cinema’s most unyielding and occasionally unnerving defender, modern-day Tom Cruise wouldn’t dare speak ill of any movie, whether he was in it or not.
Ask him about his personal life, and he’ll talk about movies. Ask him about anything, really, and he’ll talk about movies. If he’s not talking about movies, it’s probably because he’s shovelling popcorn into his mouth and can’t speak, and he never has a bad word to say about any of them.
Since he maintains that he watches almost every new release, you can’t rule out that Cruise has seen Madame Web, Borderlands, or Tom Hooper’s Cats, which would be more than enough to dent anyone’s love for the moving image. In his younger days, though, he was a lot more open.
The death-defying superstar famously hated the experience of making Ridley Scott’s Legend, which makes you wonder if he called in a favour from Xenu when the set burst into flames. That was enough to swear him off the fantasy genre forever, but it’s not the worst film he’s ever been in.
Instead, that unwanted honour goes to Cocktail, which is just awful. Because it starred Cruise in the leading role, though, it was a smash hit at the box office, albeit one that won the Razzie for ‘Worst Picture’, claimed another for ‘Worst Screenplay’, and saw the actor and Roger Donaldson shortlisted for ‘Worst Actor’ and ‘Worst Director’, disrespectively.
“What were some of the mistakes with that one?” he asked rhetorically. “Those are some of my secret pains.” For one thing, despite the opening stretch unfolding in New York City, before Cruise’s Brian Flanagan relocates to Jamaica, much of Cocktail‘s location shooting took place in Ontario.
When informed that it didn’t make a believable replacement for the ‘Big Apple’ for a second onscreen, he was in full agreement. “I know, I know, man,” the star confessed. “What can you say is wrong with the film? I never believed I was in New York. It just was not the night scene in New York.”
Taking his seat in a cinema to watch Cocktail alongside an audience was another eye-opening moment for the future Mission: Impossible frontman, who vividly recalled sinking lower and lower into his seat alongside then-wife Mimi Rogers as the low point of his entire filmography unfolded in front of him.
“You sit there, and you go, ‘What the hell happened?'” he recalled. “When we saw it on the screen, we go, ‘What the fuck is that? What the hell was that?'” What the fuck is that? That, Tom Cruise, was Cocktail, the shittiest flick you’ve ever been in, which has remained undefeated in that respect for almost four decades.
