Ross v Ross

Remember when I promised this list to you a while back when doing the best Tom Cruise singing scenes? Well, I wasn’t kidding. Okay, I was, but now we’ve run out of ideas for Top Fives. With The Cruiser all set to go sprinting again this summer in spy-com Knight And Day, now is as good a time as any to check out his best dashes.

Every actor has his forté. For Samuel L Jackson, it’s shouting. For Al Pacino, it’s shouting louder than Samuel L Jackson. Tom Cruise, however, comes from the Yasmine Bleeth school of thesping. Always have him running.

To the untrained eye, every one of Cruise’s runs is the same. Look closer and you will see the man has an amazing repertoire of runs. On the phone, in a suit, on top of a building… this is a guy who, as Vanilla Sky proves, can run in his sleep. Going to the cinema and seeing a Tom Cruise movie in which he doesn’t run is like going to a Michael Bay movie which doesn’t have explosions. Tom Cruise movies without Tom running just don’t make sense. Lions For Lambs – no Cruise running… rubbish. Tropic Thunder – no Cruise running… not as funny as it should have been. Valkyrie – no Cruise running… Hitler survives.

Just as Nicolas Cage movies need Nicolas Cage playing a total nutjob, so Tom Cruise movies require Tom Cruise running. Here are the five films in which he ran like the wind…

5. The Firm

Cruise still runs an awful lot on screen these days for a man his age, but in terms of speed he hit his stride around the early 90s. We haven’t clocked his movie dashes, but we’re willing to bet that one of his sprints in The Firm would be his personal best. There is a late foot chase in this movie yet The Cruiser really lets fly a little earlier when running down a suburban street. Probably the best running in a legal drama ever.

Watch Tom sprint his heart out in The Firm HERE

4. Vanilla Sky

Some of us dream about falling from a great height or losing our teeth. Not Tom. He dreams about running. In Times Square. Had Vanilla Sky ended five minutes after it began, it would have been the greatest movie about Tom Cruise running in his dreams ever made. More than two hours of introspective guff later, all you can remember is The Cruiser’s own mini New York marathon.

Watch Tom running down a dream HERE

3. War Of The Worlds

Steven Spielberg isn’t one of the greatest directors of all time because he made ET and Schindler’s List. He’s one of the greatest directors of all time because he takes Tom Cruise and makes him run his little Risky Business socks off for an entire movie. His running in War Of The Worlds gains extra points because he’s running from aliens. If only Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can had been a movie about Tom Cruise running.

Watch Tom evade aliens HERE

2. Mission: Impossible III

The third Mission: Impossible movie was not about competing with Bourne or Bond – it was about showing that a man in his 40s can still do a helluva lot of running. A smorgasbord of sprinting, it has Tom running down skyscrapers, running from fighter jets and running while talking to Simon Pegg on the phone. Yet none of these can beat the moment where his little legs defy gravity itself by running vertically up the walls of the Pope’s house.

Watch Humpty Dumpty sit on a Vatican wall (after running up it) HERE

1. Minority Report

The tagline for Cruise-whipper Spielberg’s excellent sci-fi was ‘Everybody runs’. Of course, it should have been: ‘Tom Cruise runs. A lot’. What Olivier was to Shakespeare, Cruise is to running, and Minority Report is his King Lear. He runs into houses, he runs downs alleys, he runs out of subways. Heck, he even runs a bath!

Watch Tom run up the side of a building HERE

WHAT ARE YOUR FAVOURITE TOM CRUISE RUNNING MOMENTS?

TOP FIVES ARCHIVE

This entry was posted on June 16, 2010 at 4:53 pm and is filed under TOP FIVES with tags Minority Report, Mission: Impossible, Movies, Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, Vanilla Sky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.