13-September-2005, 10:02 PM
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Junior Member
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Join Date: Apr 2005
Posts: 9
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Quote:
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As you doubtless noted, Mr. Cruise was the only actor to be mentioned within a hundred yards of the title...and yet, how woefully miscast he was. All he can play is a grinning boyishly handsome movie star lead guy, tolerable perhaps in "Minority Report" but his character was not present in this script. I mean, here he has to play a blue collar doofus, a loser who needs to be redeemed, the utter opposite of his one and only thespian capacity. And I was sure, after that long and impressive introductory shot which goes from the entire earth and swoops down to finally duck under the steel beams and locate Ray up in his shiny glass cabin of the hoist lift, delicately performing his gargantuan tasks...I was SURE that he with his unique skills would end up inside an alien invasion craft and use it to attack the others and get the drop on them, thus saving the world. But no, he is relegated to finding a few grenades which the aliens inexplicably allow him to keep while in custody, and then halfway up into the big sphincter he manages to release them from the belt and pull (and retain!) their pins -- with one hand. His whole job and its long flashy intro had not a blessed thing to do with the story, or even with his character, that couldn't have been done just by one shot, say having him arrive home in a hard hat. And really, the character should have been plain looking, not grinning boyishly handsome; Nicholas Cage, Steve Buscemi, Tim Roth, or even a talented unknown -- but NOT a "movie star".
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I don't understand where the criticism is. I can see how he certainly does not appear like a blue-collar worker, but he is hardly a "shining boyish hero." In fact, he appears to do a rather good job of showing a man going into denial (the "peanut butter sandwich scene"), and then panicking irrationally.
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