Cocktail ** (1988, Tom Cruise, Bryan Brown, Elisabeth Shue) – Classic Movie Review 2057

Director Roger Donaldson’s hollow, vacant and fakely concocted 1988 American romantic drama Cocktail is not a good movie. But it is a glossy, good-looking, entertaining one, acceptable, even enjoyable, as a guilty pleasure. It won two Golden Raspberry Awards for Worst Picture and Worst Screenplay. Heywood Gould’s screenplay is based on his book of the same name. 

It helps that the young Tom Cruise (aged 26) seems to be enjoying himself hugely in a gleaming surface-gloss role as Brian Flanagan, a young New York City business student who takes up bartending to make ends meet. Now a cocky cocktail bartender, he finds himself facing a choice between a sinful life of ease and sleaze as advocated by his older and wiser mentor Doug Coughlin (played by Bryan Brown) or true love with the young and lovely Jordan Mooney (played by Elisabeth Shue).

The heady mix of Cruise’s smile and charm, the Manhattan and Jamaican 80s fast-life settings, and the light satire on 80s materialism produces a stodgy brew. But Cruise’s devastating smile and his run of hits proved unstoppable, even in such tatty material as this. Cruise’s fans will be probably stirred but not shaken.

Brown’s final highly emotional letter to Cruise in the movie had the cynical London critics falling about hysterically in derisive laughter.

It features an original score composed by J. Peter Robinson. The song Kokomo was Golden Globe nominated for Best Original Song.

Cocktail received the negative reviews it deserves from critics but went on to be a financial success, earning $78.2 million at the US box office, and $93.3 million in the rest of the world to total $171.5million world wide. It enjoys a place in Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson’s book The Official Razzie Movie Guide as one of The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made.

In Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho, anti-hero Patrick Bateman shares an elevator with Cruise and compliments him on his performance in the movie Bartender. Cruise corrects him by saying the movie’s title is Cocktail. Very funny!

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2057

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