Cocktail - not really for me

My journey through the back catalogue of film history took me further through my girlfriend's DVD collection at the weekend.  After Pretty Woman and Almost Famous, we are left with the remains in the bottom of the barrel - Cocktail.  I cannot say that having never heard of a film necessarily means I should be unsurprised it wasn't very good, that's happened a lot of times before.  But maybe I should make exception in this case.

Here Tom Cruise plays Brian Flanagan, recent returnee from the army who has no job, no prospects and no things.  He heads into the heart of 1980s Wall Street Loads-a-money capitalism seeking to make his fortune.  Somehow he gets a bunch of interviews in big city firms (with no qualifications -how?) but no offers.  Only when he takes a job in Doug Coughlin bar in suburban New York and discovers a skill for - what else - making cocktails does the future suddenly seem bright.

Coming just a couple of years after Top Gun, this is one of Cruise's earliest performances in screen, and his charisma is clear.  Sadly I can't say the same for the rest of this film, which is a little bit about 1980s monetarism and another little bit about being who you are rather than who others think you should be.  Mostly it is confused about its characters, the continuity of its own events and why its female characters especially act the way they do.  Most bizarre of all is Jordan (Elizabeth Shue - her off Back to the Future) who Flanagan falls for and for whom she falls back despite Flanagan acting like a total arse around her all the time.

By the time the end comes around and - spoiler alert - Flanagan gets his happily-ever-after as presciently predicted by Coughlin in one of his opening scenes; I was left wondering how all that had happened, and why it was meant to be interesting.  Certainly this is only one for fans of Tom Cruise or fancy cocktail-making to check out.  To be fair, assuming there are no stunt doubts going on here Cruise did really well to get though the flamboyant cocktail creation scenes - but that's not enough to cause me to recommend.  A curio from the 1980s you can happy pass by.