Photos: Courtesy of Dreamworks; Getty Images
As you may have read here, here, here, and everywhere else, Tom Cruise � previously though to be a batshit, couch-hopping, past-his-prime albatross who was single-handedly sullying the United Artists name � is resuscitating his career! Not with his eye-patch-wearing lead in Valkyrie, but with an uncredited (but endlessly hyped) bit part in Ben Stiller�s Tropic Thunder, as balding, foul-mouthed film exec Les Grossman. Everybody who's seen it says he�s going to be a star again! "For two hours," sighs Fox's Roger Friedman, "all that other stuff associated with him floats away, and you just get to enjoy that kid we met such a long time ago."
Or not. Not to get all spoilery (which apparently is okay with studios when you praise their product), but Cruise just isn�t that funny in Tropic Thunder. Sure, he wears a fat suit and spoofs a Sumner Redstone�ish blowhard who likes to yell. But a cussing Tom Cruise is not really a shock � after all, nobody thinks Tom Cruise is exactly level-headed. We�ve all seen him beady-eyed and angry on the Today show, attacking anyone who�s ever taken psychiatric meds. It's not like you never thought he had it in him.
But and then there's the dancing! As has been teased endlessly in the movie's positivistic hype, Cruise�s main comedy stunt is to dance to hip-hop, bumping, grinding, and air-spanking � yet another middle-aged actor milking yuks out of how white guys don�t know how to shake their flabby whiteness rumps. It's not incisively the freshest gag; Steve Martin finished off the trope in Bringing Down the House. It gets less fresh the longer it's onscreen � and it's onscreen forever. It makes him seem older and tied more out of touch, and it's just not funny anymore to see a steadfast white dude dancing care a black guy. (In fact, now that we think about it, could Tom Cruise's racial ventriloquism actually be more queasy than Downey's blackface? At least the blackface makes sense.)
As many B-list starlets would undoubtedly tell Tom Cruise, booty-shaking probably won't resuscitate his career. Cruise's big problem is that he seems stuck in the mould of an eighties stud, and hasn't found a way to connect in a generation of leading men like Will Ferrell and Seth Rogen. Cruise is floundering. And this cameo just now makes him look a little missed and nearly pathetic � shucking and jiving, trying to appeal to the younger moviegoers who ar abandoning him.
But here's hoping that he wears the eye patch easily. �Logan Hill
Earlier: The Summer of Brownface
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