Directed by: Brian De Palma
Starring: Tom Cruise | Jon Voight | Jean Reno | Ving Rhames
Rating: FOUR out of FIVE self-destructing briefings
“I’m not the only one who’s seen you alive.”
Was Tom Cruise an action star before Mission: Impossible? Not really. Not in the blood-slick, bone-crunching, sprinting-through-fire sense we know now. He was more of a high-gloss leading man. Brooding, charming, and occasionally moist. Sure, he ran. He’s always run. The Firm was 90 minutes of him power-jogging from legal consequences in loafers.
And Top Gun? Yeah, he flies a jet. But it’s mostly locker room talk and glistening homoerotic volleyball. Then came Mission: Impossible. And suddenly, boom, he’s diving into exploding fish tanks and dangling from CIA ceilings. It didn’t just make him an action star. It made him a myth. The thinking man’s lunatic. A guy who looks a director dead in the eye and says, “I’d rather die than use a stunt double.”
In the same year, he dropped Jerry Maguire. Two back to bangers. Tom, you complete me. Rosie O’Donnell felt the same way. She name dropped him on The Rosie O’Donnell Show so often he may as well have had his own billing. She called him her boyfriend. She gushed. She swooned. She pretended they were soulmates, despite him being A-list, married to Nicole Kidman, and, well… Tom Cruise.
She had a shrine on set. Seriously. Life-sized cutouts. Photos. Merch. It was Tumblr fanfic before Tumblr. Daytime moms everywhere nodded in hormonal solidarity. Gay men squinted, did the math, and whispered, “…something’s not adding up.”
When he finally came on the show, it was treated like the Second Coming. He brought her flowers. She lost her mind. They had chemistry. But not the sexy kind. Still, it was peak ‘90s television. Pure serotonin for the soft-lit, live-studio-audience era. To his credit, Cruise played along. He smiled. He blushed. But he leaned in, because nobody weaponizes charm like Tom Cruise. Especially when the camera’s on.
The joke? Rosie was closeted the whole time. She later came out as gay, and the whole Tom Cruise is my crush bit retroactively became… something else entirely. Camp? Cover? Comfort zone? All of the above? Yes. All of it. It added a strange, oddly tender twist to the whole obsession.
And speaking of twists. Ethan Crane? That final gotcha? Jon Voight peeling off his face to reveal Tom Cruise’s ageless face? Iconic. Absurd. Operatic in a way only the ’90s dared to be. The face mask gag would eventually get flogged to death across the sequels but that first time? It sold. There was a collective gasp in the theater. And minutes later, the real Jon Voight gets blown to bits, courtesy of a helicopter tethered to a high-speed train. He wasn’t a mastermind. He wasn’t even that clever. Just a guy who bet on betrayal and lost to a man with better hair, better cardio, and a long-standing affair with death-defying nonsense.
It was spy cinema meets Scooby-Doo, but slicker. Dumber. Better.
