Tom Cruise: the last movie star

The actor Tom Cruise has recently released a new film, his first in four years thanks to Covid-induced release delays. You may have heard of it, a low-budget arthouse picture called Top Gun: Maverick.

Ecstatic critics have fallen over themselves to praise Maverick not merely as superior to the original Top Gun (a mere 36 years old now) but as one of the greatest action films ever made. It currently has a hugely impressive 97 per cent ‘Fresh’ score on the reviews aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes. Coincidentally, that’s the same score that Cruise’s previous film, Mission Impossible: Fallout, received there, too. It is proving an enormous box office hit. And the perma-smiling Cruise has done everything that he can to promote it, short of going into space – where he is heading for his next film, apparently.

I sometimes wonder what Scott Fitzgerald would have made of Tom Cruise. At a time when the idea of the actor-as-draw has disappeared from contemporary cinema, the weirdly ageless man remains the last remaining movie star working today.