With the success of ‘Dead Reckoning’, the seventh movie in the Mission Impossible franchise, Tom Cruise has not only swept aside speculations about a faltering career, but by leaping off cliffs from bikes and jumping onto moving trains, he has also ensured that his audience will want to see him on the big screen and big screen alone. And mind you, he wants to make MI movies right into his 80s!
Midway through the latest movie, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) gazes out at the Venice skyline after suffering a personal loss. And thinks about choices, perils and purposes. It is a moment of calm in a movie that zips along at a dizzying pace; a scene where you feel like reaching out to Hunt, the human being behind the impossible life that he leads, the man who is deeply, wrenchingly alone. A moment where you realise Hunt is as much a part of our collective growing up as is Tom Cruise himself, who, for an entire generation of movie-goers, was the pin-up star. He was the poster boy who was actually blessed with that million-dollar grin that every film hack loves to describe every other star’s smile as!
But what’s the secret to his enduring allure? It cannot be just his eye-popping stunts and looks, surely!
After watching ‘Dead Reckoning’, a friend declared that the July-born 61-year-old Cruise is the Salman Khan of Hollywood. The similarities are striking indeed — the mass appeal, the indestructible do-gooder on-screen persona, the enormously successful movies and, yeah, the bland acting.
But while Salman Khan is a real-life brash bhai who has had more than his share of skirmishes with the law, Cruise has scrupulously maintained the quintessential Mr Nice Guy image, his infrequent public appearances genial, polished and impeccably enthusiastic. In fact, every Christmas, Cruise apparently sends a white chocolate coconut bundt cake to his close friends — by private jet, no less.
The only blips have been his odd (to put it mildly) conviction about Scientology and his cloak-and-dagger divorce with the much-younger Katie Holmes. And oh, not to forget, his baffling chest-beating in an Oprah Winfrey show just before the divorce became public, jumping up and down the coach and shouting ‘I’m in love!’ (Yes, true story). If rumours are to be believed, Holmes cut ties with him because of his religious beliefs, the last straw being his alleged attempts to send his then-six-year-old daughter Suri to a Scientology boot camp!
But, but. Once he realised he is better off without proselytising about Scientology, he wisened up in double quick time. You don’t catch him speaking about his beliefs much nowadays. Here perhaps lies the secret to his continued success — his ability to learn as quickly as he unlearns, his extraordinary commitment to his craft and his razor-sharp self-awareness. Cruise’s fans do not mind his sudden excursions into the bizarre because, for them, he is someone who delivers what he promises — good, solid entertainment without too much fuss and with as much passion as a man can possibly put in. The star himself sums it up in his Instagram bio: “Actor, Producer. Running in movies since 1981”.