Mission: Impossible set up 8 films and 30 years of Tom Cruise’s mania in 30 perfect minutes

Usually, the Cruise Jerk would find redemption and true heroism by the end of the movie. Maverick in Top Gun is the cartoon version of this, while Charlie Babbitt in Rain Man is the more nuanced read. In the early days, in more cynically minded pictures, he would sometimes double down on his jerkdom (The Color of Money) or the movie would sort of shrug its shoulders at it (Risky Business). Later, there were cunning twists on the theme. In A Few Good Men, Cruise’s buttoned-up, whiter-than-white moral certainty is actually what makes him a jerk. Meanwhile, Jerry Maguire‘s endearing premise is: What if known jerk Tom Cruise stopped being a jerk at the start of the movie, but everyone else took a while to catch up?