Out of the box

The news that Tom Cruise’s luscious ex Katie Holmes, the only one who gave him the ben servito, so to speak, might be dating someone else, threw me on a trip down memory lane, back to those days when Cruise was the ultimate teenage heartthrob.

It all started way before he made a right fool of himself with the creepiest love declaration ever on television

Because before he lost all his marbles and went all weird cultist on everyone, he was the number one teenage crush. It all started way before he made a right fool of himself with the creepiest love declaration ever on television, and also before he became known for cash-cow blockbusters that still somehow did not quite manage to remove any of the smell of douchery that floats around him today.

Way before all this happened, Cruise was actually cool, although never quite sharing the same bad-boy image of the likes of Rob Lowe – or the latter’s penchant to hit self-destruct, for that matter.

Risky Business was the movie that launched Cruise in the good-boy- gone-bad market as the main star. The scene where he erupts into his parents’ living room wearing nothing but a pink shirt and socks, dancing to Old Time Rock & Roll, remains iconic to the era even today and it has been spoofed and re-created in countless other movies.

With Risky Business, the newbie suddenly found himself launched in the big players’ arena, all thoughts of his cassock and vows instantly forgotten.

Cruise was now type-cast into the role of teen heartthrob, which was not necessarily a bad thing considering he probably would not have been given the break in the first place had it not been for those trademark green eyes, perfect hair and cheesy smile.

Risky Business was followed by Legend; Hollywood had just flirted with fantasy a year earlier for the very first time with Ridley Scott’s The Neverending Story. The flirtation was a massive success and film-makers quickly jumped onto the bandwagon. Today, Legend is over-shadowed by the similar Labyrinth (starring David Bowie) in terms of classics of the genre.

Top Gun in 1986 probably created the cheesiest, most financially successful Hollywood love story with an equally successful soundtrack that spewed dozens of quotations that remain favoured catchphrases to this very day.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to state that, after that movie, every girl over the age of 12 had a Cruise poster in her bedroom. Or that every teenage boy suddenly wanted to be a military aircraft pilot.

While the younger cinema-goers were mesmerised by his antics in Top Gun, those who were a tad older could also appreciate his portrayal of Vincent Lauria, a newbie pool hustler in Martin Scorcese’s The Colour of Money.

This movie had two things going for Cruise: the pull of Scorcese’s name and the plot, which moved away from the previous action/comedy coupled with romance the actor had pursued up till now.

But before he could really shake off the status of pretty Hollywood boy, Cruise had one other due to pay. Cocktail, where the actor’s character of Brian Flanagan somehow injected the cool factor into the job of barman with a series of aerobics he achieved both behind the bar and in bed with one of the hottest actresses of the time – Elisabeth Shue.

The role earned Cruise a Razzi Award for the Worst Actor, but the movie was a huge box-office hit, proving once and for all that acting skills are optional when we’re talking Hollywood.

If it wasn’t for the fact that, while busy mixing Margaritas for Shue, Cruise was also starring in what was to become a box-office heavyweight, the actor’s career might have become indefinitely stuck in Cocktail and Top Gun mould. But 1988 also saw the debut of Barry Levinson’s Rain Man, partnering Cruise with Dustin Hoffman in a tense and heart-wrenching drama about selfish yuppie Charlie Babbitt, who discovers that his estranged father has died and bequeathed all of his multimillion-dollar estate to his other son Raymond, an autistic savant of whose existence Charlie was unaware.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Rain Man was followed by Born on the Fourth of July, which was also to get the actor his first Academy Award nomination for best actor. Then there was The Firm, Interview With the Vampire (very Cocktail with fangs), the Mission: Impossible saga, Eyes Wide Shut, Vanilla Sky... and all the other latter-day blockbusters everyone flocks to the cinema to watch.

rdepares@timesofmalta.com