Today, I’m going to stand up for Tom Cruise. With just a few weeks to go before the release of the next Mission: Impossible, I keep seeing a flurry of criticism on social media, polls, and the like. According to some, Tom Cruise is an overrated, subpar blockbuster actor. Frankly, it's hard to imagine a worse take. The man is so deeply entwined with the Hollywood blockbuster — which he helped redefine — that we often forget the actor behind the star. And yet.
Cruise is not just Ethan Hunt, the "Last Samurai", or Pete "Maverick" Mitchell. He’s also Ron Kovic, the broken ex-Marine in Born on the Fourth of July; Frank T.J. Mackey, the charismatic and pitiful self-help guru in Magnolia; Dr. Bill Harford, the New York physician drifting through Eyes Wide Shut (which I’m going to rewatch Monday at Cineum — can’t wait); Vincent, the cold-blooded hitman in Collateral; or the young pool prodigy Vincent Lauria for Scorsese in the underrated and absolutely brilliant The Color of Money. These are off-type roles — often disturbing, sometimes despairing — that reveal a much richer range than people give him credit for.
Who else can say they’ve worked with Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, Michael Mann, Paul Thomas Anderson, Ridley Scott, or Brian De Palma? Not many. That list alone should be enough to restore his critical standing and earn him the respect he deserves.
The misunderstanding probably comes from this: Cruise never claimed to belong to the Actor’s Studio school. He never sought artistic asceticism to earn critics' approval. He chose spectacle, efficiency, the Hollywood machine — but without ever betraying a certain idea of popular cinema — the kind that brings people together, that dazzles, and that demands uncommon physical and mental discipline.
What fascinates me about him isn't just his sense of framing or timing — it's his total integrity in execution. He performs his own stunts, often taking insane risks. He flies fighter jets, rides motorcycles, clings to planes during takeoff, scales skyscrapers. He’ll shoot a scene twenty times until it’s perfect.
He’s a craftsman, an obsessive. The Buster Keaton of the digital age, in a way.
People criticize his Colgate smile, his carefully managed image, his commercial choices, or his Scientology phase. But who else, over the past 40 years, has maintained such consistent technical excellence, range, and pursuit of a complete cinema — one that blends form with physical performance?
Cruise never fakes it. He literally puts himself on the line, for the audience’s enjoyment.
To me, he belongs to that rare lineage of actor-producers — like Chaplin — who carry a vision of cinema that is both popular and deeply personal. He’s not just in front of the camera: he builds films, experiences, modern mythologies.
And he’s a staunch defender of the industry. He frequently shows up to support his peers’ productions and encourages people to go back to theaters. When Top Gun: Maverick came out — at a time when COVID had nearly hammered the final nail into Hollywood’s coffin — Spielberg (with whom he had been estranged for years) said to him: “You saved Hollywood.”
So no, Tom Cruise is not just a star. He’s a great actor — one that, I hope, cinema history will one day view differently: not just as an icon, but as a performer of his time, deeply committed to storytelling through action, rhythm, and sheer presence.
Anyway, I can't wait to see MI8, because honestly: Ethan Hunt > James Bond — and it’s been that way for a while now.