"Cocktail" is a film from the eighties, the golden years of the yuppie, of boom-and-bust, of the "greed is good" mentality. It also takes us back to the days when Tom Cruise was a pretty-boy pinup, starring in a series of undemanding parts in undemanding films like "Risky Business" and "Top Gun". Cruise's character in this film is Brian Flanagan, a young man whose main preoccupation is the pursuit of wealth; after leaving the Army he tries hard to land a job with various top financial institutions, but is repeatedly turned down because of his lack of formal qualifications. He enrols in business school and takes a part-time job as a barman in order to support himself. While doing this he makes a couple of discoveries about himself. First, that he actually enjoys bartending more than academic study. Second, that he is attractive to women, a fact that he exploits to the full. He drops out of college, gets a job as a full-time barman, befriends an Australian immigrant named Doug, and the two of them perfect a double act of singing, dancing, juggling and reciting (appalling) poetry which they put on to entertain their customers.
Brian falls out with Doug, and the scene now moves from New York to Jamaica, where Brian is again working as a bartender-cum-gigolo. He still has dreams of wealth; the only difference is that his preferred means of achieving it is no longer working in one of the institutions of American capitalism but rather meeting, seducing and living off some wealthy young woman. Brian seems to have met his perfect girl in the shape of Bonnie, a thirtysomething millionaire businesswoman, but complications arise because he is also involved with a waitress named Jordan. Things seem to be going better for Doug, now reconciled with Brian, as he has not only found his rich lady but has also married her. Brian returns with Bonnie to New York, but they split up, and Brian attempts to get back together with Jordan, who he discovers is not only pregnant with his child but also the daughter of one of the city's richest families. Jordan's father does not want her to marry Brian, whom he regards as a fortune-hunter, and offers him a large sum of money to disappear from Jordan's life.
The film may have been intended as a critique of eighties materialism, but I am always suspicious of anti-materialist satire emanating from Hollywood, an institution ever readier to preach the virtues of thrift, frugality and glad poverty than to practise them, especially when that satire is incorporated within an obviously commercial romantic comedy designed mostly to show off the good looks and charm of its leading man. The latter part of the film when Brian converts from a crass materialist to a sensitive, caring romantic hero reeks of insincerity, especially as Cruise's character is so unsympathetic, going straight from preening dandy to priggish paragon of virtue. Although the film's message is ostensibly "Be content with who you are", I couldn't help feeling that Brian would have become less insufferably cocky if he had become a stockbroker or merchant banker rather than a bartender. Doug's life, by contrast, goes downhill and he ends up committing suicide- a grave mistake on the part of the filmmakers as Bryan Brown made him about the only tolerable character. His mordant cynicism, shining like a naughty deed in a goody-goody world, would have acted as a necessary antidote to the hypocritical sentimentality of the later scenes. None of the female characters, Jordan, Bonnie or Doug's wife Kerry, emerge as credible individuals in their own right; they are simply devices to enable the plot to revolve around the male characters.
The one good thing about this film is that it ended the pretty-boy stage of Cruise's career. In his very next film, "Rain Man", he emerged as a gifted actor, capable of giving intelligent performances in serious films, an impression strengthened in his next film after that, "Born on the Fourth of July". In the light of those films, and later excellent ones such as "A Few Good Men" and "Eyes Wide Shut", "Cocktail" must today seem like an embarrassment from his past. 4/10
