10 Greatest Ever Tom Cruise Running Scenes
He feels the need. The need for speed.
'Running in movies since 1981'.
Even Tom Cruise's social media bios are in on it. Now long past being an ongoing joke, running is now as much an expected part of the star's big-screen output as performing a death-defying stunt. Audiences have now been conditioned to expect at least one scene in each one of his movies where Cruise does his signature run, all upwards-pointing arms and bolt-upright posture, and some people get upset when it doesn't happen.
Basically, Tom Cruise is to 'running really fast, often for no reason' what Nicolas Cage is to 'losing his sh*t and acting crazy, often for no reason'.
As you would expect from somebody who has been gracing our screens for the last 37 years, Tom Cruise has done a lot of running on the big screen. In fact, recent news articles actually proved that his movies perform better at the the more he runs.
Now it has been proven as an indisputable fact of science that the Tom Cruise Run equals success, expect the action star to keep sprinting across multiplex screens for as long as humanly possible.
10. Mission: Impossible II
Mission: Impossible II may have marked the critical nadir for the franchise, but it was still the highest-grossing movie of 2000, racking up an impressive $546.4m. It remains one hell of a stylish movie, as you would expect from action maestro John Woo, but has dated badly and now serves as a time capsule of where the genre was around the turn of the millennium.
The movie features plenty of the action movie cliches that had taken over the genre post-Matrix and all of its director's well-known artistic flourishes, encapsulated in the fact that Tom Cruise ticks virtually all of the early-2000's boxes while running.
Slow motion? Sparks flying? Martial arts? Wire fu? Doves (well, pigeons in this case)? A leather jacket? Cruise does it all without breaking his stride, becoming a running advertisement for what action movies essentially were at the time in the process.