Tom Cruise Double Features

Movies to pair with THE movie star.

May 27, 2022

This weekend, Tom Cruise opens Top Gun: Maverick to rave reviews (including mine), almost four decades after breaking onto the Hollywood scene in his pink shirt and undies.

That’s four decades of being a movie star.

Big Tommy C fan? Use your Memorial Day weekend to watch some of these double features, featuring great Cruise performances paired with movies that go down the same way.

Risky Business (1983) and The Babysitters (2007)

When the cat’s away, the mice will play.

When the parents are gone, the hijinks are on.

When Tom Cruise’s parents are away in Risky Business, he finds himself mixed up with prostitutes, pimps, and Porsches.

When Katherine Waterston’s parents are too clueless to be bothered in The Babysitters, she starts her own ring of prostitutes, pimps, and minivans — sending out her teenage friends to the middle-aged dads in the neighborhood.

Both films are films about teens that aren’t really for teens, as they are way too sexy for their own good while being entirely devoid of any lessons or moralities.

On second thought, maybe they’re perfect for teenagers.

If you’ve seen and liked Risky Business, odds are you don’t know The Babysitters, but they would be so great paired together.

Cocktail (1988) and Coyote Ugly (2000)

There’s plenty of cock in Cocktail, but no ugly in Coyote Ugly — two movies that are exactly the same, just gender-swapped.

Both films follow aspiring-somethings as they deal with relationships, life in the City That Never Sleeps, and having to pay the bills with the art of bartending. In Cocktail, that’s the art of flairing: pouring drinks by tossing bottles behind your back, juggling glasses, and looking totally ridiculous. In Coyote Ugly, it’s the art of being really pretty and dancing on top of bars during the song “All She Wants to Do Is Dance.”

This is not an innovative double feature. But it is a damn fun one.

Days of Thunder (1990) & Gone in 60 Seconds (2000)

After a smash hit where Tom got to go zoom zoom zoom (Top Gun) in ’86, he decided to go vroom vroom vroom in ’90 with Days of Thunder. He’s joined by the gorgeous Nicole Kidman and a grizzled Robert Duvall as he vrooms around the racetrack, pumps his fist a lot, and wins the Daytona 500.

Follow that up with Nicolas Cage doing some vrooming in Gone in 60 Seconds as he must steal 50 cars all in one night. His companions are a blonde Angelina Jolie and a grizzled Robert Duvall. It’s just as obvious as your first film, but even more mind-numbing. It’s way grittier — just what you want in a second feature.

A Few Good Men (1992) & And Justice For All (1979)

Is this entire double feature built around the iconic lines “You can’t handle the truth!” and “You’re out of order! The whole trial is out of order!”?

Maybe!

It’s not. But if you traded out the great Jack Nicholson performance in AFGM for a great Gene Hackman performance in the following year’s The Firm, the best line you’ll get is, “ How about you get down on your knees and kiss my ass for not indicting you as a co-conspirator right now, you chickenshit little Harvard cocksucker?”

Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and The Room (2003)

Hear me out…

Polar opposites in every way.

Good vs. bad.

New York vs. San Francisco.

Winter vs. summer.

Sexy sex vs. belly-button sex.

Directed by one of cinema’s greatest auteurs vs. directed by Stanley Kubrick.

All joking aside — How do you follow up the three-hour chilling, intense, perverted, critically acclaimed Eyes Wide Shut? Well, that first feature will probably end late. So let’s go opposite. Let’s go midnight movie. Forget the polish, let’s go straight trash.

There is no doubt in my mind that these movies would go so well together in a completely unexpected way.

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