TOM CRUISE DIGS HIMSELF A HOLE: The botched conclusion to a star’s 20-year campaign to restore his image.
Two words: viral video.
Mr. Cruise had the misfortune of having these back-to-back incidents occur at the exact moment when video-sharing sites came online. Instead of moments confined to a single broadcast and then to memory, his antics became immortalized on the internet, where the world could watch them on a loop. He went “viral,” back when the term was new, for all the wrong reasons.
It nearly killed his career.
This would have been the end for a lesser celebrity. But just as the Lord has blessed Mr. Cruise with undeniable talent, He has also blessed him with smarts and patience.
Since 2005, Mr. Cruise has followed a plodding, single-minded strategy to rebuild his image: mostly safe roles and a wide berth around the riskier material that once earned him Oscar nominations.
The plan has worked. He is still a major box-office draw. The plan has also meant that, with the exception of playing a U.S. senator, a rockstar, and an unforgettable bit part as a scumbag Hollywood mogul, his résumé has looked like this for the past 20 years: a spy (2006), a military officer (2008), a spy (2010), a spy (2011), a veteran (2012), an astronaut (2013), a military officer (2014), a spy (2015), a veteran (2016), a soldier (2017), an aviator (2017), a spy (2018), an aviator (2022), a spy (2023), and a spy (2025).
It’s a far cry from the five years before Mr. Cruise’s public meltdown when he took on audacious projects: “Eyes Wide Shut,” “Magnolia,” “Vanilla Sky” and the near-perfect “Collateral,” in which he played against type as a villain.
But now we have “Digger,” which Mr. Cruise chose as the conclusion of his long charm offensive. In his partnership with Mr. Iñárritu—the director whose 2015 epic “The Revenant” won Leonardo DiCaprio his long-overdue Oscar—Mr. Cruise surely hoped the movie would be his own ticket to the elusive Best Actor statuette and a return to a steady diet of more serious work.
“Digger” will almost certainly accomplish neither. On the contrary, its weird and off-putting press tour has already undone some of what the past two decades had accomplished in reviving his appeal.
Curiously, after his anti-global warming movie bombed spectacularly, in order to resume his career, Cruise will once again hoist himself into the cockpits of gas guzzling fighter jets and racing cars to entice moviegoers to load the family into the SUV and truck on over to the multiplex:
● Top Gun 3 Gets Encouraging Update, Tom Cruise Wants It to ‘Beat’ Maverick.
● Anne Hathaway Joins Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder Follow-Up; Paramount Sets Release Date.
