Clearly, Lee Child hasn’t seen Mission: Impossible – Fallout. The author behind the Jack Reacher novels was never the biggest fan of the relatively diminutive Tom Cruise playing a character that was written as a hulking human being, but now Child has gone a step further by claiming that the 57 year-old Cruise is too old to be starring in action movies.
While there may be a time for every aging action icon to hang up their boots for good, as recent reactions to both Rambo: Last Blood and Terminator: Dark Fate seem to have indicated for Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the logic hardly applies to Cruise here. After all, the actor is renowned for performing his own stunts no matter how dangerous they may be, whether it be scaling the world’s tallest building or learning how to pilot a helicopter for a high-octane chase scene, all in the name of entertaining audiences.
Cruise may not have been the right fit physically for playing Jack Reacher, but the first movie and sequel Never Go Back delivered two solid-if-unspectacular genre flicks, that allowed the star to play a more grounded role than the likes of Mission: Impossible’s Ethan Hunt. However, after the second installment underperformed at the box office, Reacher went back to the drawing board and is set to be rebooted, with Child also admitting that Cruise wasn’t too happy about the news, either.
“He had his own investment in it, he was going to argue against it. It sounds extremely patronizing but I think it’s good for him. He’s too old for this stuff. He’s 57, he needs to move on, transition to being a character actor. He could get another 20 years out of it. He has the talent. He’s a terrific guy, very considerate, good fun.”
Clearly, Tom Cruise didn’t get the memo, as he’s set to shoot the seventh and eighth installments of the Mission: Impossible series back-to-back, so who knows what kind of insane stunts he’s got planned in order to raise the bar even higher. The Jack Reacher movies marked a diversion from the actor’s usual big-budget fare, but with Mission and Top Gun next on the agenda, it seems that the aging action star is content to rely on the franchise flicks that made him one of the biggest names in the business.
