Cocktail (15)

There are career choices, and then there are career swerves. It is in such a swerve that we find Tom Cruise in 1988, post-Top Gun, and about to hit Cocktail face-first.

The young hot-head is Brian Flanagan (Cruise), a man with big dreams and an even bigger ego. Unfortunately, his résumé consists mostly of “owns a smile”, he is rejected from numerous jobs on Wall Street as he doesn’t have a business degree. So he takes a job as a bartender to pay his way through business school because, in 80s movies, bartending wasn’t a job. It was a stepping stone to just about anything.

Here he encounters Doug (Bryan Brown), who introduces Brian to the world of flair bartending. Here, instead of just making it a drink, the bartenders launch into a five-minute routine involving juggling, spinning, and flipping. By the time the drink arrives, the customer has aged visibly.

Cocktail is a deeply bizarre artefact of its time that offers a front-row seat to peak 80s excess, so it is hard to hate. It’s funny, it’s occasionally baffling, but it’s never, ever boring.