Why Doesn’t Action Tom Cruise Work Outside the ‘Mission: Impossible’ Movies?

Quick quiz: can you name the only movie Tom Cruise has made this decade that wasn’t an action blockbuster? That’s right, you sharp readers: it was Rock of Ages in 2012. Setting aside that lone exception, the Tom Cruise we’ve gotten every year since 2010 has been Action Tom Cruise. This includes films like Knight and Day, Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow, Jack Reacher, and of course the fourth and fifth Mission: Impossible films. This kind of dogged determination to define himself ever more narrowly in his advancing years might be more understandable except for one thing: outside the Mission: Impossible movies, Tom Cruise action vehicles are all busts.

It wasn’t always this way. Tom Cruise wasn’t only an actor who ran full-speed away from explosions and hitched rides on the wings of airliners. He made movies like Jerry Maguire and A Few Good Men and Rain Man and Tropic Thunder and Magnolia and Interview with the Vampire. Remember how good Tom Cruise was at being a full-of-himself jerk who found his humanity? Remember how he was able to tap into his own inherent weirdness for comedic and dramatic effect? Remember how unsure we all were as to how much intentional homoeroticism to read into Lestat and Louis?

And then … honestly, who knows what the reason was. I’m no psychologist, nor a career counselor. Maybe it was the one-two punch of the movies he made with Steven Spielberg (Minority Report and War of the Worlds) that did so well. Or the failure of non-action movies like Vanilla Sky, Valkyrie, and Lions for Lambs. Maybe he just liked making the Mission: Impossible movies more than any of the others. Whatever the reason, all the other Tom Cruises — Courtroom Tom, Cocky Jerk Tom, Comedy Tom — all took a back seat while Action Tom assumed the whole show.

This would be fine — not great; we’d still miss those other flavors of Cruise, but fine — if he only made Mission: Impossible movies. There has only ever been one bad Mission: Impossible movie (sorry, part two), and they all make money. And they all let Tom Cruise be exactly the kind of does-his-own-stunts superhero he wants to be. The problem lies in all the other action blockbusters that he’s now decided are his bread and butter. They’re all pretty bad (with one glorious exception that we’ll get to shortly), and they’ve all been financial duds domestically. (Factoring in foreign box office, they all end up around the $250-300 million range, roughly a third of what the Mission: Impossible movies pull in.) With a Jack Reacher sequel upon us, is it time to ask why Cruise doesn’t work as an action star when he’s not playing Ethan Hunt?

The thing about Mission: Impossible as a franchise is that whereas the Marvel universe has Captain America and Iron Man, and even the Bourne movies have Bourne, the M:I movies only have Tom Cruise. When the fourth movie, Ghost Protocol, came out, there were whispers that there were plans to siphon the franchise off onto Jeremy Renner’s character. Which sounds frankly insane, and not only armed with the hindsight that Renner wasn’t able to pull that off with the Bourne movies. Cruise isn’t being carried by the Mission: Impossible movies; he’s carrying them. He just can’t seem to make that same thing happen for something like Oblivion, and that can’t only be because Oblivion isn’t a very good movie.

Maybe the answer can be found in the one exception to the rule: Edge of Tomorrow was a box-office disappointment, yes, but it was actually a great movie, as good as (if not better) any of the Mission: Impossible movies. Audiences stayed away, perhaps because audiences today are looking for sure things; Mission: Impossible is a sure thing. You know because you’ve seen that same movie in four or five different iterations before. What do you remember about any given M:I movie? One stunt? An opera house here. A skyscraper there. That thing where Cruise hovered an inch above the floor on wires? If each M:I  movie involved the same plots just with different stunts, would most people really notice?

This isn’t meant to shortchange the M:I movies, which have been as reliable a source as there is for action thrillers for the past ten years. Just maybe instead of interspersing those action gems with crappier attempts at action (or good ones that Cruise’s audiences don’t care about), maybe Tom Cruise could try being a movie star — an all-kinds-of-movies star — again.

Rent Mission: Impossible on Amazon Video.
Stream Mission: Impossible II on Prime Video or Hulu, or on Showtime Anytime.
Stream Mission: Impossible III on Netflix.
Rent Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol on Amazon Video.
Stream Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation on Prime Video or Hulu.