A eulogy to the time Tom Cruise made films about what it means to be human

You're wasted in Jack Reacher sequels, Tom, and we want you back.

I love Tom Cruise. I think he’s a fantastic actor and just insanely watchable. If I’m four tiny glasses of red wine deep on a long haul flight and ready for a movie, I’m going straight for the Cruiser and whatever completely bananas sci-fi/action film he’s most recently made.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disparaging this current phase of his career. I enjoyed the hell out of Mission: Impossible and still get a kick out of the sequels no matter how much Simon Pegg might try and ruin them. Oblivion and Edge of Tomorrow were fun, and if nothing else, these type of Cruise vehicles allow space for one of his best attributes to shine: running really fast and purposefully.

It’s sad however, that he seems to have given up working on films that deal with the frayed wiring of the human heart.

His good run started in 1988 with Rain Man. He had shown a talent for playing arrogant, abrasive characters in Top Gun and Cocktail, but with this film he used bravado to wounding, attritive effect, Charlie Babbitt softening from major asshole to fairly good guy who stands by his brother.

Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (1988)

Cruise was transformative the following year in Born on the Fourth of July, magnetic in 1996’s Jerry Maguire and in 1999 collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut, a beguiling erotic film that explored the wandering eyes of husbands and wives and a pretty brave choice for Cruise who was married to co-star Nicole Kidman at the time.

His apotheosis came the same year with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. Let’s bask in that performance for a second:

Cruise showed incredible range in this movie, playing an abhorrent motivational speaker with such panache, using movement to convey character just as much, if not more so, than his voice. This macho super confidence and stoicism would be eroded later in the movie in an interview with a probing journalist, then completely demolished during a visit to his father’s deathbed, a scene (above) still put on a pedestal more than 15 years later.

Vanilla Sky shortly followed, and while there was a hell of a lot wrong with that movie, it still saw Cruise interested in exploring identity and the fragility of ego.

But then, around the time he started saying things like “I think psychiatry should be outlawed” and became more overtly involved with a certain religious movement, he started phoning it in.

The Last Samurai, Collateral, Jack Reacher...none of these were terrible movies, but Cruise started choosing films which hoped to do little more than simply ‘entertain’.

Granted, his Spielberg collabs, Minority Report and War of the Worlds, were entirely solid, but the same applies in terms of tone and ambition.

Now, in 2016 and five Mission Impossible films deep, his trajectory shows no sign of altering - his next three movies being a Jack Reacher sequel, a smuggler-turned DEA agent crime thriller (Mena) and The Mummy. A reboot of a goddamn Brendan Fraser action-adventure.

Come back, pre-millennium Tom Cruise, we miss you.