Perhaps one of the most effective ways to remove the sour taste of the systematic extermination of twelve million people is to spend time in the company of two idiotic wankers dancing around each other’s arsehole. Cruise and his elderly mentor Bryan Brown are such cash-chasing, monumental twats in this massive box-office hit that it’s nigh on impossible to look away. You actually want one of their customers to be a bartender-dismembering serial killer and for the flick to end with their grinning murderer tossing around their vital organs in the same way they flipped glasses, shakers and bottles. Alas, no such luck, although at least Brown has the decency to slit his own throat in a baffling but highly amusing late attempt to introduce gravitas into this quintessentially 80’s piece of flash crap.
Cruise has just got out of the army and wants to make a million smackeroos in New York, but in lieu of qualifications, experience or connections he offers a 1000-watt smile. It’s enough to convince Brown to take him on as a bartender after an in-depth interview in which he confirms he could eject both a 400-pound psychopath and a 100-pound speeding ballerina from a bar. Disappointingly, we don’t get to see Cruise do either. No matter, for Cruise and Brown quickly become a dream team as they entertain their massed, empty-headed customers with one round after another of high-fiving, hip-swaying, twirling, clapping and poetry-spouting tomfoolery.
Bizarrely, not one parched patron insists they cut out the ice-throwing horseshit and instead efficiently serve drinks, which is surely what a good bartender does. Hot chicks, of course, are dazzled. Sample dialogue: (Pretty girl) “I’d like to try The Orgasm, please.” (Cruise, grinning) “How many would you like?” (Girl, virtually with her legs at 180 degrees) “Multiple.”
Hmm, maybe there’s a reason The Cruiser has never tackled Shakespeare…
Of course, such an alcoholic nirvana can’t last and in a series of jarring, implausible plot jumps, Cruise ends up tending a beachside bar in Jamaica. Naturally his lovelorn guru follows, keen to continue articulating a philosophy (“A bartender is the aristocrat of the working class”) that can best be summarized as shite.Boy, Cocktail sucks, but I’m fond of just about every loopy, fabricated moment. You can tell it wants to say something deep about capitalism and the need to balance love and commerce, but it falls well short when compared to Cruise’s earlier, similarly themed masterpiece, Risky Business. All it does say is that men can’t get anywhere without a rich chick propping them up, a homoerotic bond isn’t always consummated, and you’re probably not going to take the business world by storm if your start-up venture focuses on the pressing need of makeup for pets
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