The Long Run : Tom vs. Keanu
sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Tom Cruise and Keanu Reeves, two baby-faced Boomer stars, are both endlessly fascinating to me. Both of them are in their Unstoppable Force era, quite notably doing their own stunts. Both are the indefatigable anchors of beloved action franchises, and their characters in said franchises are essentially ciphers—their primary personality trait is “determined.” Their characters’ closest relationships all seem to be with people from work. And neither of them can ever stop moving.
“The living manifestation of destiny.”
Tom Cruise’s run is famous. Famous enough to be the star of countless supercuts, and iconic enough that his run getting interrupted by anything is a subversion of the Tom Cruise Action Movie genre. (My fave instances—when he gets tased in Edge of Tomorrow, and when he gets tased on top of a car in Mission Impossible 3. He falls so funny.)
The reason for all of this notoriety is that the run really calls attention to itself. His posture is ramrod-straight, his elbows and knees are at 90 degrees, and his fingers are flexed. Cruise is never jogging. It’s a full on sprint that reasonably shouldn’t last more than several seconds at a time, but has been known to last for consecutive minutes of screen time.
He’s covering serious distance at a pace built to survive 100m. This should not work. If there’s a better metaphor for Tom Cruise’s whole deal, I’d love to hear it.
By rights, Tom Cruise’s career should look very different. After 40+ years in the game, he should not still be box office gold. If anything, he should have aged into the Old Man Action era, where all the punches are slow (and sped up in post-production), and all the incompetent henchmen attack one by one. He should not still be climbing tall things and hanging off flying things and jumping motorcycles off mountainous things. And yet.
The one you sent to kill the fucking boogeyman
As John Wick, Keanu’s run is a lot less flashy. John is not sprinting anywhere, even though he is always quite literally running for his life, because John is conserving his energy. Partly because he knows that whenever he gets where he’s going, he’s going to have to kill a lot of people; and partly because, unlike any of Tom Cruise’s characters, John Wick is mortal.
You can see the weight of every step; he is willing himself forward with equal amounts of disgusted rage and pure world-weariness. Very few of the people he calls on to help him are ever happy to see him, and most of them have to be convinced to help him at all. In the Missions Impossible, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is driven by his belief that only he can save the world from the constant threats it faces. John Wick is driven only by a naggingly constant need for revenge. And that need is exhausting him.
Unlike Cruise and Ethan Hunt, Keanu and John Wick don’t have hardly anything in common. Keanu’s entire persona is kind of other-worldly, but less as the personification of brutal vengeance and more as the personification of gentle whimsy. He just doesn’t seem troubled by earthly concerns. Action movies are a job, and one that he’s very good at, but they’re not a calling that he’s going to risk life and limb for.
This also makes me think that the two franchises have to end very differently. Spoilers for the John Wick movies here, but John Wick is now very much dead. Keanu seems to have enough distance from the role to know that a person can’t sustain when vengeance is their only animating force. Tom doesn’t seem to have any such distance, so his megalomania about saving Hollywood from COVID and streamers overlaps neatly with Ethan Hunt’s megalomania about saving the world all the time. So, even though the next Mission Impossible movie is meant to be the final installment, I doubt very much it will end with Hunt’s death. Tom Cruise’s ego simply can’t die before his body does.
All I want to know is when we'll be able to see Keanu & Tom in a movie together 🤩