With his entrancingly comic turn in Ben Stiller's "Tropic Thunder," currently the No. 1 motion-picture show at the box power, Tom Cruise has critics raving and America talk � and this time it's not about the infamous couch-jumping incident.
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Cruise's look at on a profanity-loving pic executive is "the function of a lifetime," according to a Slate review.
"Who could hold foreseen Tom Cruise closely stealing the movie in a fat suit, a prosthetic nose, a skinhead wig and an Austin Powers-style mat of dresser fur?" wrote Slate's Dana Stevens in her radiance critique of the celluloid. "Cruise is always at his topper when he's skewering some unpleasant aspect of his own persona; thus, the crazed motivational speaker he played in 'Magnolia' was a vocation high compass point, and the supremely crude Les Grossman is another."
But will it be enough to make up for Cruise's settle from the public's honorable graces? From couch-jumping on "Oprah" when he was unable to contain his love for Katie Holmes, to his devotion to Scientology to feuding with Brooke Shields over whether postpartum mothers should be allowed to take medicinal drug to easiness symptoms of depression, Cruise has aroused up unrivalled controversy after another.
Will the buzz he's garnering for one small movie role be enough to turn it all around?
Image technical Evangelia Souris thinks so.
"It's a modest part, just it's funny," said Souris, who runs Boston-based look-alike management firm Optimum International. "If you're trying to improve your image, you want to get attention � only you want to appease in the realm of eliciting a positive reaction. For Tom, this role takes us back to what made him a superstar in the number 1 place. It reminded us that he can act."
And that, she and other image consultants said, is a expectant start. He's following in the paths of other celebrities qualification headway in transforming their images, like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.
"I think Tom's comeback isn't as 'Mission Impossible' as we're making it out to be," aforesaid Vinnie Potestivo, a partner at Classic Entertainment Group, a selling and talent booking firm. "While I don't see his use in 'Tropic Thunder' as a character-changing event, I do project it as a gradation in the right direction."
But just showing off those acting chops won't be enough to turn Cruise's image some, according to some observers.
"The changes in the perceptual experience of Tom Cruise has nothing to do with his acting or the movies he was doing," said Henry Schafer, exectutive vice president of Marketing Evalutions Inc., the company that tracks Q stacks, which criterion the likeability quotient of public figures. "So positive onscreen roles may non help. It's got to be a combination of things. And it's loss to take time."
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