Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Sandra Bullock: Why retro Hollywood still matters

“It’s not the plane, it’s the pilot,” Miles Teller as Rooster reminds Tom Cruise’s Maverick what really matters, during an aerial escape scene in Top Gun Maverick, when the latter doubts whether their archaic F-14 can outrun the more sophisticated enemy jets chasing them. They do, of course. With Tom Cruise in the pilot’s seat, you don’t expect otherwise. Cruise’s career, never on a steadier course than the past few months since the Top Gun reboot released to blockbuster box office, has of late looked like the classic model of a plane he pilots with aplomb. At 60, the global superstar has emerged Hollywood’s golden oldie, with _Top Gun Maverick_ outrunning more sophisticated comic-book franchise releases that flaunt the heady VFX glitz. Indeed, Top Gun Maverick, with a $1.48 billion global gross, has finished 2022 only behind _Avatar: The Way Of Water_ , and ahead of _Jurassic World Dominion_ , _Dr Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness_ , Minions: The Rise Of Gru, _Black Panther: Wakanda Forever_ , _The Batman_ and _Thor Love And Thunder_ .

The point isn’t merely about box office stats. Importantly, it is about how Cruise and Top Gun Maverick have led the charge of old school Hollywood against the more hyped new-age franchise productions that have been occupying popular mind space for well over two decades now. For, Top Gun Maverick continues the retro definition of heroism that catapulted Cruise to stardom for the first time 36 years ago in the late Tony Scott’s 1986 release Top Gun. The 2022 reboot was a reiteration of the fact that the classic Tom Cruise charm still works, and is in demand as ever in a Hollywood that has drastically changed over the decades. Yet, Cruise’s pop patriotic machismo cleverly finds contemporary relevance in a plot seeped in world politics. The film is about a US mission to destroy a uranium enrichment facility of an unnamed East European nation that violates NATO protocol. Top Gun Maverick couldn’t have been better timed for the box office as well as the Oscars given Russia’s ongoing military aggression in Ukraine. If Cruise’s mantra to assert the relevance of his vintage image lay in rehauling a mix of action and pop patriotism against a backdrop of new-world politics, it is reminiscent of what the studios frequently did through the eighties and the nineties. Meanwhile, there are other stars of the era, too, who have made an impact lately with a revisit of what worked once but with a new-age twist. When George Clooney and Julia Roberts returned to familiar rom-com turf with _Ticket To Paradise_ late last year, the initial critical response to the film was guarded. For one, the Hollywood romantic comedy as a genre would broadly seem exhausted in recent times. Importantly both Roberts and Clooney had no major big screen achievements to show in recent years.

Ticket To Paradise has done surprisingly well, and the reception the Ol Parker film has seen worldwide would make it seem like Clooney and Roberts never went away. Since its release in October, the film, riding a budget of around $60 million, has done global box office business of over $172 million (and counting). The success of the film, just like Top Gun Maverick, underlines an important axiom of show business: If old school has to survive and thrive among new-age success stories, it has to suitably reinvent its essence to match contemporary tastes. For, Roberts and Clooney’s new hit is as much about imagining what might happen if their stock romantic prototypes were to grow old, as it is about corrective characterisation. Ticket To Paradise casts Clooney, now 61, and Roberts, 55, as a divorced couple from New York who are yet to get over their tendency to bicker whenever they meet. Clooney’s dapper old David Cotton could have been the charming Jack Taylor of the 1996 hit, One Fine Day, in his younger days. Roberts as David’s stylish ex-wife Georgia Cotton would be an aged update of several prototypes that the actress played in rom-com hits of the nineties such as Something To Talk About, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Notting Hill and Runaway Bride. The difference is, in Ticket To Paradise the two stars are far from the picture of perfection that they revelled in during their heydays. Ol Parker’s film reworks the stereotypes that sustained Clooney and Roberts’ stardom back in the day and, apart from the happy conclusion for the sake of a rom-com ending, broadly fleshes out the characters in a way the two actors get the scope to act out believable roles. The film is about the Cottons rushing to try and stop their young daughter from marrying out of blind love because, they believe, doing so when they were a young couple in the nineties was their biggest mistake. In the process, Parker reveals the warts beneath the seemingly beautiful couple that is still old school in essence but tweaked to suit the more pragmatic tastes of today’s audience. Clooney and Roberts’ Oceans franchise co-star Brad Pitt is at it, too. Pitt’s macho-comical image as a Hollywood star worked well last year in Bullet Train, but with a cheeky course correction twist. _Bullet Train_ , riding a budget of around $90 million, went on to make over $239 million worldwide despite facing allegations of whitewashing a Japanese book-to-film venture. For Pitt, now 59, it was an opportunity to go politically correct with an image that sustained his stardom on and off the screen in the past. In the film, his character, an assassin named Ladybug, apologises to a woman for “mansplaining” his point of view. Asserting his image in the film as “the new improved me”, Pitt first yells “Eat a bag of d*cks, lady” to an irritable female character and then profusely apologises, saying: “I’m sorry, I’m working on it”.

They’re all playing their age. What’s more, if male stars as Cruise, Clooney or Pitt focus on reimagining image in tune with Hollywood’s newfound political correctness, their female counterparts have evolved beyond damsels-in-distress cliches. Take Sandra Bullock in last year’s old school adventure hit, _The Lost City_ , for instance. The film put Bullock on familiar turf of comedy-action, as an author of romantic novels who, along with the cover model of her books (played by Channing Tatum), is forced by an eccentric billionaire (Daniel Radcliffe) to go on a hunt for the ancient lost city of treasures described in one of her novels. Bullock, who has been as smart a businesswoman as a reinventing star, produced the film as almost all her recent releases.

In fact, almost every one of Hollywood’s retro stars have been producing their films. It is something our Bollywood stars do regularly, too. Only, it would seem like the superstars of Hindi films are yet to fully understand the advantage of that situation beyond minting money, and grab the opportunity to impress with roles that let them play their age while they do something relevant on screen that suits new-age tastes. Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist, and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.