Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, reeling from a recent viewing of The Mummy, has written one of the best “whither Tom Cruise over the last decade?” pieces in a long while. Does Cruise intend to be some kind of throbbing Energizer Bunny in power-pump action franchise flicks until he’s…what, 70 or thereabouts?
Gleiberman excerpt #1: “The eerie thing about Cruise’s career in the last decade is that he has been churning out the cinematic equivalent of holograms. It walks like a Tom Cruise movie, it talks like a Tom Cruise movie (it’s got speed and ‘intensity,’ even a soupçon of cleverness), but it’s a Tom Cruise movie that leaves no shadow. It’s a piece of virtual entertainment.”
Gleiberman excerpt #2: “Cruise now seems to be throwing franchises against the wall to see which of them will stick. Another M:I film, another Jack Reacher mystery, now The Mummy and what’s next? He’s all these characters, but in another way he’s none of them, because the characters (except for Ethan Hunt) aren’t sinking into moviegoers’ imaginations. They’re like suits of clothing he’s rotating through.”
Gleiberman excerpt #3: “At the very moment when he should be taking on more character roles, Cruise has doubled down on one thing and one thing only: the awesome global transcendence of his image. He’s still choosing movies like he’s king of the world, [and] proving that, each and every time, by making movies that exist for no organic reason but to win the box-office contest they’re not even winning anymore has become, for Cruise, a game of diminishing returns: for his fans, and for himself, too.”