5 Tom Cruise Movies That Are Genuinely Bad

1 week ago 12

Outside his work as an actor, Tom Cruise is something of an enigma, to say the least, but also, you don’t have to venture outside his filmography to find a ton of strange and interesting things. Like, he’s been active for decades now, and has also been a rather bankable movie star for a lot longer than most stars remain so. He’s also doing so at a time in movie history when some people say that the idea of a “movie star” is a thing of the past, as in it feels less likely that a movie will be a hit, nowadays, just because it has a certain actor in it. But Tom Cruise might be one of those stars, still? And even if not, he’s still in massive movies and consistently seems keen to give them his all, as the last few Mission: Impossible films demonstrate pretty well. He’s been understandably celebrated for doing even more physically, within that action series, as time has gone on and he’s gotten older.

Beyond action movies and blockbusters, there are also so many iconic movies Cruise has starred in, and a real range, too. In Tropic Thunder, he stole just about every scene he was in, and the same can be said for Magnolia, though those two movies are very different genre-wise and tonally. He was also in Stanley Kubrick’s final movie, Eyes Wide Shut, worked with Steven Spielberg on two sci-fi movies (Minority Report and War of the Worlds), and then was one part of a great cast in the legal drama A Few Good Men. That feels like scratching the surface, to some extent, and it speaks to Tom Cruise’s body of work being surprisingly consistent, for someone so prolific. But a few misses are understandable, if you’ve been working steadily as an actor for 40+ years, and the following movies are just that: big old misses. They're the only Tom Cruise movies that can be called bad, while the rest of the films he’s been in tend to be decent – or somewhat flawed – at worst. This will also only include movies he had a starring/prominent role in, so no Endless Love (1981), which was his film debut, but he’s also barely in that one.

5 'Legend' (1985)

The ranking equivalent of tearing off the Band-Aid is happening here because, yes, Legend does have its defenders. It’s got a few things to offer, though a solid Tom Cruise performance is not one of them, because he does not seem nearly as confident as usual in this particular role. Tim Curry fares a lot better, and his villainous character’s design is pretty cool, for the sections of the movie that he is in. Also, Legend does often look quite striking throughout, and it’s aesthetically pleasing like some of Ridley Scott’s other genre films from around this time.

It’s got nothing, quality-wise, on those other Ridley Scott movies, though, and Cruise would go on to be much more at home in a Tony Scott movie instead, released one year on from Legend (a little film called Top Gun). Narratively, Legend is pretty abysmal, as it’s just a series of encounters that take place during a very generic and overly familiar adventure/fantasy/quest sort of story. It’s not good. It’s really not good. Like, Curry’s fun, and it doesn’t look bad, but trying to engage with any other parts of the movie, other than those aspects, proves to be a pretty dull – and maybe even slightly irritating – affair.

4 'Lions for Lambs' (2007)

Lions for Lambs was such a waste of talent, and probably the most disappointing Tom Cruise movie, because you can kind of summarize all the other movies here in a way that makes them sound already a bit off on paper. But when you look at Lions for Lambs, it really does appear like it should be a winner. It was directed by Robert Redford, and he also stars in the film alongside a great cast that includes Cruise, Meryl Streep, and Andrew Garfield in one of his very first roles, plus some other recognizable supporting/character actors. And it’s a political drama/thriller movie that has a few different threads going at once, and occurs in real-time, so that’s likely to look enticing to anyone who was watching and enjoying 24, which was big back in the 2000s.

Just watch 24 instead of this, really. Like, any random episode. Even those not-so-great ones found in either seasons 6 or 8, or the stretch in season 2 where Kim keeps stumbling into terrible situations through sheer bad luck, including getting tracked by a cougar. Sorry to go off rambling about another real-time-related piece of entertainment that technically doesn’t have anything else to do with Lions for Lambs, but this is such a boring movie to watch, and then it’s similarly dull to think and/or write about. It’s been left behind and forgotten, more or less, in the nearly 20 years since it came out, and it should probably stay more or less lost to time, in all honesty.

3 'Cocktail' (1988)

Absolutely baffling, but also without having the decency to be bad in a fun way, Cocktail feels like it took a look at all the other movies that are unapologetically products of the 1980s and whispered under its breath, maliciously, “Amateurs.” It sure was a time in history that a movie about a guy being a bartender and that’s sort of just it for nearly two hours could come out, and then also somehow be successful. Cocktail made a lot of money, and it’s also about a guy trying to make a lot of money. By bartending. And hustling, but not in a very interesting way.

You can kind of compare it to The Color of Money, except it’s not about pool, and it’s also not nearly as good (and make no mistake; that early Tom Cruise movie isn't perfect, either). Cocktail is a bad hangout movie, and then it’s a bad escapist/vacation movie, and then it’s a bad melodrama. It just feels so lazily written and thrown-together, as far as the screenplay was concerned, and Tom Cruise is the only person who feels like he’s bringing just a little life to the whole thing. It’s not much, but he’s trying, despite the lousy material he’s been given to work with. What a film. What an (un)lovely film.

2 'Losin' It' (1982)

Tom Cruise and Shelly Long seated together in Losin It

Thankfully, Losin’ It is pretty obscure, so you're unlikely to stumble across it, unless you're foolish enough to actually go and seek out those lesser Tom Cruise movies, then proceed to spend time watching them. Oops. But to save all those who've not lost it (their minds) by watching Losin’ It, it’s an attempted raunchy teen comedy about a group of unlikable friends who go on a road trip to Tijuana, spending time there doing increasingly questionable things, with Tom Cruise thankfully not being made to play the least savory of the bunch (that role goes to Jackie Earle Haley).

It’s not that Losin’ It aging poorly is the main problem; it’s more that it was never that funny to begin with.

Speaking of people in this movie, it’s probably most noteworthy for having three people in it who’d go on to have roles in Top Gun: Cruise (of course), John Stockwell, and Rick Rossovich. It’s also a movie directed by someone who went on to do much better things later in his career: Curtis Hanson (see L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys, and 8 Mile). It’s not that Losin’ It aging poorly is the main problem; it’s more that it was never that funny to begin with. There might be a handful of mild, isolated laughs throughout, but they're not worth slogging through the rest of the film to get to. You're better off watching almost anything else from the ‘80s that Tom Cruise was in… well, except maybe Cocktail, Legend, and Endless Love.

1 'The Mummy' (2017)

Annabelle Wallis holding on to Tom Cruise's arm in fear in 2017's The Mummy

There are lots of movies that are part of a long-running Mummy franchise of sorts, though it’s gotten rebooted and reworked a whole bunch, so it’s not like all the movies are part of the same series. The Mummy (2017) was something of a reboot for the whole thing, and further, it was intended to be the start of an entire cinematic universe. The Marvel Cinematic Universe had been a pretty big deal for about a decade, in 2017, and others wanted to get in on that kind of thing. DC had a decent stab at it, or at least had a few installments before getting itself rebooted by the mid-2020s (see the most recent Superman). The MonsterVerse has done pretty well, also, and is still going, as of 2026. The Dark Universe, quite embarrassingly, did not last beyond The Mummy.

It felt like a forced attempt to make the monster movie equivalent of Iron Man (2008), and the desperation of trying to reverse-engineer such a film that could then lead to other sequels and spin-offs existing within an interconnected cinematic universe was far too ambitious. Of course, things weren’t helped by the fact that The Mummy was pretty bad just as its own movie, with such an uncertain tone, and a feeling of way too many cooks being involved behind-the-scenes. Cruise has come out the other side with his career intact, but it’s easily the biggest misstep of his acting career, not just of the century so far, but maybe even of all time, since many of those earlier roles in not-great movies from the ‘80s can more easily be forgiven. He was still establishing himself, and then had easily established himself by 2017, with The Mummy – and its failure – ultimately serving as a stark reminder that he was really just human after all, and very capable of stumbling over himself while otherwise running through the film industry, so to speak, at an impressive pace.