Cocktail, shameless Tom Cruise vehicle about a star bartender, has soap opera dramatics, exotic 1980s locales, and nothing to say
A portrait of a world that never existed in which making a mean mai tai was the equivalent of achieving true greatness, Cocktail is a beautifully constructed piece of trash.
Cocktail Tom Cruise, Bryan Brown, Elisabeth Shue; Director: Roger Donaldson
Forget the Swinging Sixties. Forget disco. No nightlife era was as awesome as the 1980s. Being a bartender was the best thing ever: their regular customers drank heavily but weren't alcoholics; they tipped extremely well, dressed sexily and regularly slept with the staff but weren't sluts.
Or at least that's what Cocktail taught us. Hot off the heels of the game-changing Top Gun, the film is another of the era's strangely similar "Tom Cruise vehicles": a movie that's shameless with its all-too-familiar story about a rising star and his ageing mentor.
Cocktail is blatant in its there-could-be-a-sequel plot: after leaving the army (air force, perhaps?), young hotshot Brian (Cruise) is desperate to make some money and decides to try Wall Street. But when he's turned down for the ridiculously unfair reason of having zero qualifications, he's forced to take a job as a bartender, where he discovers a world in which the guy who makes drinks for a slave wage is king.
Cue lots of mixing montages, soap opera dramatics, exotic 1980s locales and uh, suicide. Ignoring the strangely dour scriptwriting near the ending,