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"My best work comes when I'm really communicating with the director," Cruise says, "and I work great with Brickman." Brickman praises Cruise's ability "to play innocence and heat back to back. When he read for the part, he stopped himself halfway through, said, 'Wait, I think I can go in this direction,' and started over again. That was a courageous thing for a 19-year- old to do, but Tom is a courageous guy. He's got a will for excellence."
Cruise's next picture, All the Right Moves (1983), was an earnest, working- class remake of Risky Business. This time he was a steel-town senior whose only hope for a college scholarship was through football stardom. But this was no chic adolescent fantasy, just a drab ring around the blue collar, and suddenly Cruise had lost the big mo he earned with Risky Business. It would take time to win it back. Legend (1986), which he spent a year shooting in London, didn't help. Ridley Scott's airless fable had too much fairy glamour and no breathing room for an intense, American-style actor. As the peasant boy Jack, Cruise gets to decapitate goblins, but he looks stranded amid the special effects. The movie made him hide from his own smartest instincts.
Top Gun (1986), directed by Ridley's brother Tony, had enough smarts to cadge $350 million. Enthralling and deplorable by turns, this tale of hot rodders in the sky limns a life of quick thrills. Cruise's Pete ("Maverick") Mitchell is a Navy buzzboy who fills his downtime with volleyball, partying and swell sex. But Maverick is truly juiced up in his F-14, where sex and sport fuse into career and patriotism, where an ace can wage a Nintendo war with death as the penalty. "Your ego is writing checks your body can't cash," an instructor warns him. In Top Gun, though, death happens only to supporting players, and advice is something only a wimp would heed.
Give Cruise this: he takes suicidal militarism and makes it affably sexy. He stares at you, murmurs, "That's right, I am dangerous," and zaps a grin that tells you how much fun he expects to have mowing your butt. Maverick is the master of machismo, his talent nearly matching his arrogance. He needs only to learn the elements of style. Top Gun shares Cruise's grinning, winning style; it says that Maverick and his kin are a better breed. The picture cashed its checks on the actor's body. So did the Navy, which set up booths outside theaters. But with its climactic dogfight against Soviet MiGs over the Indian Ocean, Top Gun also caught flak for being a sort of recruitment poster for World War III.
Cruise defuses the criticism. "It was a nice E-ticket ride," he says, "a simple movie, but involving. These guys risk their lives every time they go flying. It's tremendous fun and requires a lot of intelligence and skill." He is impressed with those who master any dangerous, complex craft, and if offered the chance, he is determined to match them at it. Producer Simpson recalls taking Cruise, who was not yet committed to the project, for his first ride in an F-14: "When he hit the ground, he said, 'I'm in.' "