606. Cocktail (1988)

Starring: Tom Cruise, Bryan Brown, Elizabeth Shue

Director: Roger Donaldson

Running Time: 104 mins

Cocktail is an American film about a young man who, upon leaving the army, takes up a job as a bartender to get by, and as he begins to excel at his new profession, he moves to Jamaica where he falls in love.

This film is seriously poor. I like the baby-faced Tom Cruise of the 1980s as much as the next person, but this film is horrifically cheesy, not at all charming, and has characters with which you have no sympathy or interest, and a story that should be reserved for teen rom-coms.

The worst thing about this film is that it’s a romantic drama. Top Gun and Days of Thunder were along the same lines, but at least they had another, more action-packed and more interesting plot to follow along, whereas this is just pure romance and that’s it.

What’s disappointing is that this film could have actually had a great story from where it starts off. Instead of plunging into a cheesy romance for nearly the whole duration, a plot about the rise of this young man to a hugely successful bartender and how he matures (which is shown, but only for 10 minutes) would have been a lot more interesting, whereas the romance makes him just seem like a petulant teenager.

And then, there’s the horrible cheese in this film. Firstly, the soundtrack, while it’s full of decent songs, they really change the atmosphere of the film and turn it into this disco romance story, which is an unbelievably cheesy and fake type of film, while a lot of the dialogue and acting was at a pretty low quality that it seemed all the less convincing.

The film also has no attempt to be at all funny or charming. I understand that it’s a drama and not a rom-com, but there should have been a lot more jokes to make this a little bit of a lighter watch, because otherwise, it’s just a dull and frankly depressing story to follow.

Finally, the main character, Brian Flanagan. While I’ve already said that he appears to be some sort of whining teenager for the whole film, he’s also an extremely annoying and frustrating character, who you never really grow to like, and that means that you can’t connect with him, and the entire story falls apart, so that’s why this gets a 4.9.