10 Massively Underrated 2000s Movie Performances

Once again, Tom Cruise is an actor who has firmly established himself as a master of action. While far from the physique associated with genre legends like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone, Cruise is a consummate professional who revels in performing his own stunts and all the gunfights, explosions and car chases the Mission: Impossible team can throw at him.

With Minority Report, The Edge Of Tomorrow, Jack Reacher, War of the Worlds and The Last Samurai under his belt (to name a few), there’s no questioning his achievements there. However, for some movie fans, his best performance is also one of his most underappreciated: Vanilla Sky’s David Aames.

Vanilla Sky certainly has a mixed reception; being so experimental, open to interpretation and venturing into a range of genres doesn’t strike a chord with everybody. The character of Aames (a once-carefree business owner with a disfigured face from a car crash, who escapes into a lucid dream state with the help of a company dubbed Life Extension) can also polarize opinion, as the audience is never quite sure whether they feel sympathetic towards his plight or not.

It’s a movie to watch multiples times in order to fully digest, and its reception has certainly been hurt by that. Even so, this is one of Cruise’s most interesting and unusual roles to date.