Tom Cruise runs as he does all things — nothing held back, nothing in reserve, nothing but the motion of arms and legs in the action of an automaton bent toward a single direction: forward, all systems go.
He has run across Red Square and the Charles Bridge. He has run across Abu Dhabi and Shanghai. He has run all over London, enough to be your tour guide for the particularly cardio-focused tourist, though his ankle bit it on a jump in Blackfriars. No matter: his recovery left his gait unchanged, that karate chopping, chest down, head forward momentum that turns the edge of the screen into the tape of a finish line.
For Hollywood, it is the most iconic depiction of movement on film since The Horse in Motion.
What would happen to Hollywood if he stopped? This last great hope of theater owners, the action star who demands a big screen, the star who refused to be a superhero and made his own superhero instead — perhaps if he stopped running, the whole of Hollywood would cease to exist? It might be that the movie palace facades would crumble, the handprints on the Walk of Fame fill in with concrete, Ben Lomond Mountain shrink into a plateau… and so Tom Cruise runs, so we do not have to find out.
“It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place,” the Red Queen told Alice. “If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.” Tom Cruise has taken that theory to heart. This was always the key: to outrun the detritus of the past, the weirdness of his church, the Oprah couch jump, Rock of Ages, the decay of age and his father’s abuse… and leave them all in the dust as he speeds toward the far horizon. He turns himself into Czeslaw Milosz’s tireless messenger who “runs and runs, through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies.”
The end goal? Irrelevant. Tom Cruise runs because that is what he is there for, because it is who he is, because he is a creation meant always to be in motion, because the more he stands still, the more you can see him champing at the bit, vibrating with energy. There are streets he has yet to run, and they call to him.
