Director: Tony Scott
Cast: Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards
Have I Seen it Before: I’m sure I have. All of the “big” lines of the film hit something like a memory, but I can’t say I can point to a moment where I saw the whole film from beginning to end.
Did I Like It: And that’s maybe part of the problem. This is a movie of moments which don’t really hang together as a whole piece. That quality—a collection of pieces which don’t measure up to a complete whole—is endemic of a lot of 80s films. For instance, Rocky IV (1985) might qualify as a short if you take away all of the montage—although I haven’t seen the recent director’s cut.
One can almost feel Cruise aching to take more direct control over the films in which he appears, but for the mean time has to be content with being charming but restrained in films.
And there’s more than enough charm to go around. A Harold Faltermeyer score immediately launches any film into the territory of pure 80s confection, even those he scored outside the decade. The cast is never not charming, including not just supporting turns from Kilmer and Edwards, but also blink-and-you-miss-them performances from actors who would eventually go on to bigger things like Meg Ryan and Tim Robbins. Yes, Robbins hovers around the edges of the film, spending the run time as not much more than a glorified extra.
One wonders how somebody like Robbins drifted (and I assure you, he does drift) into a film with such jingoistic politics. A film treating the essentially inevitable outbreak of World War III as the feel good turn for the third act would never be made out of the 1980s (at least, I don’t think it would, I’ll let you know when I finally get around to seeing Top Gun: Maverick (2022)) and probably shouldn’t be made by any reasonable person, ever. Maybe if it did try to weave together a more coherent, fuller package of a movie, it would be impossible to have any fun with it at all.