Tom Cruise

Top Gun

  • Title: Top Gun
  • IMDb: link

If you weren’t alive in 1986 it’s hard to explain how big Top Gun was. Now, nearly four decades later, a sequel is about to hit theaters so it’s time for Throwback Tuesday to look back at the movie which introduced us to the United States Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program and United States Naval Aviator Lieutenant Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in a role that would solidify Tom Cruise as a movie star. Cruise so loved the film, he found a way to star in nearly the same story four years later with Days of Thunder.

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Mission: Impossible – Fallout

  • Title: Mission: Impossible – Fallout
  • IMDb: link

Mission: Impossible - Fallout movie review

Very much a sequel to Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Mission: Impossible – Fallout brings back both heroes and villains from the previous film. As we saw in Rogue Nation, the various other government agencies are still struggling to work with the IMF. This isn’t helped when three nuclear warheads slip through Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) hands in the opening action sequence and are about to be sold on the black market to a terrorist with delusions of grandeur.

Forced to work with CIA thug August Walker (Henry Cavill), Hunt and his team (Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg both return) accept their assignment, but, as usually happens, things don’t go according to plan. Rebecca Ferguson and Sean Harris both return to reprise their roles from the last film as a potential love interest for Ethan and a villain harboring and even bigger boner for the spy who put him behind bars.

Although Jeremy Renner isn’t present here, the latest in the franchise includes callbacks to several of the earlier films and in some ways feels like a final chapter to the series (while still leaving the door open if Cruise and company wish to return).

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American Made

  • Title: American Made
  • IMDb: link

American Made movie posterWe’ve seen this all before. And even if we’ve seen it done better at times (see Charlie Wilson’s War, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short, American Hustle, and others), American Made certainly entertains. Director Doug Liman and screenwriter Gary Spinelli come together with star Tom Cruise to offer us another one of those stories too crazy not to be true.

Cruise is in fine form. I’ve remarked before that I have always enjoyed the movie star more when he’s able to unleash a bit of the crazy. And American Made certainly has enough crazy to go around. The film is based somewhat loosely on the real experiences of former TWA pilot Barry Seal (Cruise) who went to work for the CIA in the late 70s and 80s running clandestine reconnaissance missions in South America while also working on his own making money smuggling drugs into the United States from Columbia. After introducing us to his Seal, his wife (Sarah Wright) and the CIA agent (Domhnall Gleeson) who enlists him and funds the dubious enterprise, the insanity begins in earnest. What makes things work is Seal is just smart enough to know when to take advantage of the situation and just dumb enough to not know when he’s over his head.

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Jack Reacher: Never Go Back

  • Title: Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
  • IMDb: link

Jack Reacher: Never Go BackTom Cruise seems to have found himself a new action franchise. These movies may not be in league with Mission: Impossible films, but for trashy B-movie action flicks you could do worse than Jack Reacher and it’s sequel. Returning as former Military Police Officer turned hermit Jack Reacher, Cruise is pulled back to Washington when his phone-friend Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders) gets herself arrested.

After breaking Major Turner out of prison, Reacher and his new partner search for answers as to who really killed the soldiers under her command and the reason why someone is going to such trouble to hide the truth. Along the way they will also pick-up a teenage girl (Danika Yarosh) who is targeted by the shadowy private military organization (is there any other type?) responsible for framing Turner. Without giving away the reasons for her involvement in the adventure, the subplot does offer a stronger emotional tie to Reacher’s mission the second time around.

The sequel lacks the over-the-top crazy villain Werner Herzog provided in the first film but has plenty of private soldiers for Reacher to take down (sometimes quite brutally) over the film’s two-hour running time.

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Mission: Impossible

  • Title: Mission: Impossible
  • IMDb: link

Mission: ImpossibleAlthough it began a series of increasingly good summer blockbuster over the course of two decades, 1996’s relaunch of the television series of the same name as a theatrical film (which introduced the world to Tom Cruise‘s most successful ongoing character in IMF Agent Ethan Hunt) is problematic at best. Poorly plotted, including a huge fuck you to fans of the original series by turning the television show’s central hero (Peter Graves) into a greedy villain (Jon Voight) selling CIA secrets to the highest bidder, the film hasn’t aged well. Turning Jim Phelps into a villain would be like rebooting Superman into a coldblooded killer. What kind of an asshole would do that?

Opening with the death of an IMF team (Kristin Scott Thomas, Ingeborga Dapkunaite, Emilio Estevez) and Ethan on the run from his former bosses who believe he is responsible, the film climaxes early on with a break-in at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It’s this sequence, and really only this sequence, that’s worth noting from the otherwise forgettable tale.

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