Best To Worst: Tom Cruise’s Action Movies Ranked

3. “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol”
For a movie that features a fairly paper thin, outdated premise—even for a ‘Mission Impossible’ movie—‘Ghost Protocol’ is pretty damn entertaining, at least most of it. The premise essentially: a mad man wannabe Russian terrorist wants to launch a nuclear strike on the U.S. so a global world war will start, and the reasons why are explained, but none of it really makes a lick of sense. But credit director Brad Bird (“The Incredibles”) for orchestrating a movie so taut and engaging, that moves with such shark-like momentum, that you don’t really care or question the maguffin-like nature of the villain. Yes, ‘Ghost Protocol’ does get a little rote in its third act, but the Burj Khalifa Tower sequence in Dubai is positively thrilling, near-breathtaking in its edge-of-your-seat craziness and the sandstorm scene that follows it is equally inventive, using blindness and lack of sight in an incredibly clever manner that you don’t see often in action movies, as well as using silence and pauses to ramp up the tempo and tension. ‘Ghost Protocol’ doesn’t have much in the way of character — at least not for Tom Cruise — most of the emotional beats in the movie surround Paula Patton’s character’s need for revenge and a guilt-complex for Jeremy Renner, but it’s not like “Mission Impossible” films ever had much in the way of personal development, and after the misstep of focusing too much on his home life in “Part III,” it’s kind of a relief that Cruise/Hunt gets to be the taciturn, enigmatic hero once more. And for all that, there are some great little character moments in amongst the action—not only does falling down actually seem to hurt this time, perhaps our favorite beat happens just after Cruise (of course) jumps from the hospital building early on. Hitting a van on the way down and tumbling to the ground, he exchanges a look with his pursuer which is as much “I can’t believe I made that!” as it is “So long, sucker!” which is exactly the kind of gentle, witty subversion that the film does so well throughout. Considering what a satisfying, engaging action film, ‘Ghost Protocol’ is, just imagine what would happen if Brad Bird and Cruise teamed-up for a movie with a real screenplay.
What Does Cruise Jump Off And How High Is It? Em, hello, the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, where have you been? Of course he “only” climbs out from about the 120th floor or so up to the server room, and it’s up to Lea Seydoux to actually fall out of it, but still we can’t help but think that “Mission: Impossible 5” may be delayed while they wait for a higher structure to be built to fling Cruise out of next time.

2. “Minority Report”
As fine an example as we can summon, of amazing skill and craft going into the telling of a story that possibly doesn’t really deserve such glossy treatment, Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report” is easier to admire than to love. But there is plenty that is admirable, especially in filmmaking terms, with the production design and the staging of some of the set pieces particularly effective, as well as a vision of next-generation tech that is both plausible and impressively imagined (we really thought we’d not be as taken with it this time out, what with the prevalence of iPads and motion-sensitive programming and whatnot, but no, that big bank of clear screens that Cruise throws images around on is still the coolest). It’s just a shame it’s all hung on a convoluted and overly tricksy plot (and yes we know it’s Philip K Dick’s story) that requires just too many disbelief suspensions to really satisfy—from the “magic” of people seeing the future (but only murders) to the central murder itself, to the obviousness of who is the real culprit pretty much from moment one, there’s only so much running and jumping that Cruise can do to distract from the daftness. And an air of somber sobriety, complete with trademark Spielbergian broken family, sits rather at odds with the attempts at visual humor, as when Cruise, in one of his own signature moves, crashes in through a window and ends up in a contorted heap in the middle of a yoga class, or when the flames from a pursuing cop’s jet pack accidentally flame-grill a row of burgers. Side characters too are often bizarrely amped-up for quirk, with Peter Stormare’s back street eye surgeon unable to deliver a single line without an eye joke in it and Tim Blake Nelson’s prison guard inexplicably given a full-on organ to play to the cryo-suspended (or whatever) inmates. So it often doesn’t work, and is lumbered a credulity-straining plot and with Boring Sci-fi Title #435 (see also: “Source Code,” “Edge of Tomorrow” et al) but when it does work, as with the “spider” attack sequence, half of which Spielberg shoots in overhead shots through broken ceilings while a blindfolded Cruise hides out in an ice bath, it really works.
What Does Cruise Jump Off And How High Is It? On two occasions Cruise jumps from tall buildings, the first is when he’s escaping by jumping onto passing hovercars, and the second where his flings himself and his assailant off a rooftop, fights on the way down and saves himself by activating the man’s jet pack at the last moment. The latter is especially good and goes to prove that when it comes to Tom Cruise Jumping Off Stuff (or indeed to Tom Cruise in general), height isn’t everything.

1. “Top Gun”
Feelings run so high over Tony Scott’s 1986 fighter pilot classic that a staffer who dared suggest the first two films on this list switch rankings has been thrown in the Playlist dungeons on bread and water for a week. No doubt part of that is nostalgia, but a great deal of that nostalgia is pretty well-founded: “Top Gun” may have been parodied and critiqued (especially on the basis of its homoeroticism, thanks Quentin Tarantino) into smithereens in the decades since, but that really just goes to show what a peerless example of its genre it really is. Not so much formulaic as the film that established the formula that others copied faithfully thereafter, it’s also marked by never-bettered aerial combat sequences that prove the late Tony Scott’s pretty much unrivalled way ability to craft pure adrenaline highs from footage of boys playing with their big, noisy toys. To recap the plot for anyone who’s forgotten one of the Seven Basic Stories: Maverick (Cruise) is a reckless fighter pilot with Daddy issues, who enrolls in an elite training academy along with his best friend (Anthony Edwards’ Goose), comes into conflict with a similar Alpha (Val Kilmer’s Iceman), romances a sexy instructor (Kelly McGillis), loses his mojo following the death of his friend for which he feels guilty, and finally regains it by finding out the truth of his father’s death and ultimately teaming up with his old nemesis to bring down some real bad guys. All accompanied by an insistent rawk score by Harold Faltermeyer, interspersed with HUGE tracks like Berlin’s “Take my Breath Away” and Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone,” on a soundtrack that also made unlikely action movie heroes of …The Righteous Brothers. But the biggest legacy of “Top Gun” was Cruise himself: if “Risky Business” had made him a star, it was “Top Gun” that made him a megastar and it’s impossible to think that he’d have attained the level of stratospheric fame he subsequently did, without this snarling, testosterone-fuelled power chord of a film as a launchpad.
What Does Cruise Jump Off And How High Is It? Answer: a F-14 fighter jet, and pretty damn high—Cruise’s Maverick goes into a flat spin after being buzzed into Iceman’s jetwash, forcing him to eject from his plane several thousand meters above the water, which goes ok for him, but not so well for Goose, and presumably trashes the plane entirely. In fact all of Cruise’s subsequent jumps/falls put together would scarcely make a dent in this spectacular, narratively convenient plummet.

Outliers
Where is “Collateral” you say? Well, it’s not really an action movie per se, but in case you’re curious, the Michael Mann-directed drama would probably be on the top of the list (or neck and neck with “Top Gun”), if we did consider it. You’ll find love for it in the features we did on our favorite Tom Cruise performances (and the longer, Most Tolerable Cruise performances) as well as in our Michael Mann retrospective. Other outliers that we considered that didn’t quite make the “action” classification include the decent Brat Pack showcase “The Outsiders,” in which Cruise’s role is not so central and which we covered in this Before He Was Famous feature, and the dire paddywhackery of “Far and Away” which would certainly take the bottom spot here if we felt its land race scenes lifted it out of the category of turgid romance and into the category of turgid action film. But they don’t. Wanna scream about how wrong we’ve got our order? That’s what the comments section is for. –Jessica Kiang,  Rodrigo Perez, Ben Brock and Oli Lyttelton.