cocktail tom cruise full movie

Cast & Crew

Brian Flanagan

Bryan Brown

Douglas 'Doug' Coughlin

Elisabeth Shue

Jordan Mooney

Laurence Luckinbill

Traditional values trump glitz. Not for kids.

• Average 4.2

Information

© 1988 TOUCHSTONE PICTURES

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Cocktail (1988) Stream and Watch Online

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Looking to watch ' Cocktail ' on your TV, phone, or tablet? Tracking down a streaming service to buy, rent, download, or watch the Roger Donaldson-directed movie via subscription can be challenging, so we here at Moviefone want to do the heavy lifting. Below, you'll find a number of top-tier streaming and cable services - including rental, purchase, and subscription alternatives - along with the availability of 'Cocktail' on each platform when they are available. Now, before we get into the various whats and wheres of how you can watch 'Cocktail' right now, here are some particulars about the Interscope Communications, Touchstone Pictures, Silver Screen Partners III comedy flick. Released July 29th, 1988, 'Cocktail' stars Tom Cruise , Bryan Brown , Elisabeth Shue , Lisa Banes The R movie has a runtime of about 1 hr 44 min, and received a user score of 61 (out of 100) on TMDb, which put together reviews from 1,381 well-known users. Interested in knowing what the movie's about? Here's the plot: "After being discharged from the Army, Brian Flanagan moves back to Queens and takes a job in a bar run by Doug Coughlin, who teaches Brian the fine art of bar-tending. Brian quickly becomes a patron favorite with his flashy drink-mixing style, and Brian adopts his mentor's cynical philosophy on life and goes for the money." 'Cocktail' is currently available to rent, purchase, or stream via subscription on Microsoft Store, AMC+, AMC on Demand, Vudu, Amazon Video, YouTube, Google Play Movies, and Apple iTunes .

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Product Description

Tom Cruise is electrifying as Brian Flanagan, a young, confident, and ambitious bartender who, with the help of a seasoned pro (Bryan Brown -- GORILLAS IN THE MIST, F/X 2), becomes the toast of Manhattan's Upper East Side. But when he moves to Jamaica and meets an independent artist (Elisabeth Shue -- ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING, HOLLOW MAN), their vivid romance brings a new perspective to the self-centered bartender's life. Sizzling with high-powered performances and a #1 hit soundtrack, the box office blockbuster COCKTAIL has it all!

Product details

• Aspect Ratio ‏ : ‎ 1.85:1
• Is Discontinued By Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ No
• MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ R (Restricted)
• Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 0.7 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches; 0.01 ounces
• Item model number ‏ : ‎ 786936124965
• Director ‏ : ‎ Dean Semler, Roger Donaldson
• Media Format ‏ : ‎ Color, Widescreen, Multiple Formats, NTSC, Closed-captioned
• Run time ‏ : ‎ 1 hour and 44 minutes
• Release date ‏ : ‎ August 13, 2002
• Actors ‏ : ‎ Tom Cruise, Bryan Brown, Elisabeth Shue, Lisa Banes, Laurence Luckinbill
• Language ‏ : ‎ English (Dolby Digital 5.1), Unqualified
• Studio ‏ : ‎ Buena Vista Home Entertainment
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000065V3G
• Writers ‏ : ‎ Heywood Gould
• Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 1
• #498 in Romance (Movies & TV)
• #2,089 in Drama DVDs

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Where to Watch

Rent Cocktail on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

What to Know

There are no surprises in Cocktail , a shallow, dramatically inert romance that squanders Tom Cruise's talents in what amounts to a naive barkeep's banal fantasy.

Audience Reviews

Cast & crew.

Roger Donaldson

Brian Flanagan

Bryan Brown

Douglas 'Doug' Coughlin

Elisabeth Shue

Jordan Mooney

Laurence Luckinbill

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Rotten Tomatoes® Score

Cruise was never been a bad actor, but this film about a flaming sex symbol has elevated him to definitive stardom. [Full review in Spanish]

Cocktail kicks off with an entertainingly lighthearted opening stretch revolving around Brian's initial entry into the world of bartending...

Cocktail is a vacuous throwback to Saturday Night Fever -- without the cultural novelty. The script is spiked with some comic lines, but overproof doses of inadvertent humor kill the effect.

As if realizing that his star hasn't smiled for 15 minutes, Donaldson tacks on a goody-goody ending that would shame the Care Bears. How to sum up what went wrong? Cruise has a line in the movie: "Flat beer from rusty pipes."

Ultimately, the ideas in this film fall as flat as stale beer and honest emotions are as watered down as cheap whiskey. This Cocktail is definitely on the rocks.

Cocktail is so steeped in corn, the drama seems comedic and the comedy is about as funny as a hangover.

Cocktail is a bottle of rotgut in a Dom Perignon box.

The pairing of old-hand Brown and young-hand Cruise may have been meant to remind us of Cruise and Paul Newman; if so, think of this as The Color of Counterfeit Money.

Perhaps the best one can say for this bland concoction mixed by agents and the studio executives is that every bartender in Hollywood wants to be Tom Cruise and that suffices as an ironic subtext.

It may not be a megaton bomb, but Cocktail is definitely of the Molotov type.

Additional Info

• Genre : Drama, Comedy
• Release Date : July 29, 1988
• Languages : English, Spanish
• Captions : English, Spanish
• Audio Format : 5.1

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Cocktail - watch online: streaming, buy or rent

Currently you are able to watch "Cocktail" streaming on Disney Plus. It is also possible to buy "Cocktail" on Microsoft Store, Apple TV, Google Play Movies, YouTube, Cineplex, Amazon Video as download or rent it on Apple TV, Google Play Movies, Microsoft Store, YouTube, Amazon Video, Cineplex online.

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Where does Cocktail rank today? The JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity within the last 24 hours. This includes clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as 'seen'. This includes data from ~1.3 million movie & TV show fans per day.

Streaming charts last updated: 9:29:59 p.m., 2024-05-04

Cocktail is 2104 on the JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts today. The movie has moved up the charts by 989 places since yesterday. In Canada, it is currently more popular than Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues but less popular than Meet the Robinsons.

After being discharged from the Army, Brian Flanagan moves back to Queens and takes a job in a bar run by Doug Coughlin, who teaches Brian the fine art of bar-tending. Brian quickly becomes a patron favorite with his flashy drink-mixing style, and Brian adopts his mentor's cynical philosophy on life and goes for the money.

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Streaming Charts The JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity within the last 24 hours. This includes clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as 'seen'. This includes data from ~1.3 million movie & TV show fans per day.

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"Cocktail" tells the story of two bartenders and their adventures in six bars and several bedrooms. What is remarkable, given the subject, is how little the movie knows about bars or drinking.

Early in the film, there's a scene where the two bartenders stage an elaborately choreographed act behind the bar. They juggle bottles in unison, one spins ice cubes into the air and the other one catches them, and then they flip bottles at each other like a couple of circus jugglers. All of this is done to rock 'n' roll music, and it takes them about four minutes to make two drinks. They get a roaring ovation from the customers in their crowded bar, which is a tip-off to the movie's glossy phoniness. This isn't bartending, it's a music video, and real drinkers wouldn't applaud, they'd shout: "Shut up and pour!" The bartenders in the film are played by Tom Cruise , as a young ex-serviceman who dreams of becoming a millionaire, and Bryan Brown , as a hard-bitten veteran who has lots of cynical advice. Brown advises Cruise to keep his eyes open for a "rich chick," because that's his ticket to someday opening his own bar. Cruise is ready for this advice.

He studies self-help books and believes that he'll be rich someday, if only he gets that big break. The movie is supposed to be about how he outgrows his materialism, although the closing scenes leave room for enormous doubts about his redemption.

The first part of the movie works the best. That's when Cruise drops out of school, becomes a full-time bartender, makes Brown his best friend and learns to juggle those bottles. In the real world, Cruise and Brown would be fired for their time-wasting grandstanding behind the bar, but in this movie they get hired to work in a fancy disco where they have a fight over a girl and Cruise heads for Jamaica.

There, as elsewhere, his twinkling eyes and friendly smile seem irresistible to the women on the other side of the bar, and he lives in a world of one-night stands. That's made possible by the fact that no one in this movie has ever heard of AIDS, not even the rich female fashion executive ( Lisa Banes ) who picks Cruise up and takes him back to Manhattan with her.

What do you think? Do you believe a millionaire Manhattan woman executive in her 30s would sleep with a wildly promiscuous bartender she picks up on the beach? Not unless she was seriously drunk. And that's another area this movie knows little about: the actual effects of drinking. Sure, Cruise gets tanked a couple of times and staggers around a little and throws a few punches. But given the premise that he and Brown drink all of the time, shouldn't they be drunk, or hung over, at least most of the time? Not in this fantasy world.

If the film had stuck to the relationship between Cruise and Brown, it might have had a chance. It makes a crucial error when it introduces a love story, involving Cruise and Elisabeth Shue , as a vacationing waitress from New York. They find true love, which is shattered when Shue sees Cruise with the rich Manhattan executive.

After the executive takes Cruise back to New York and tries to turn him into a pampered stud, he realizes his mistake and apologizes to Shue, only to discover, of course, that she is pregnant - and rich.

The last stages of the movie were written, directed and acted on automatic pilot, as Shue's millionaire daddy tries to throw Cruise out of the penthouse but love triumphs. There is not a moment in the movie's last half-hour that is not borrowed from other movies, and eventually even the talented and graceful Cruise can be seen laboring with the ungainly reversals in the script. Shue, who does whatever is possible with her role, is handicaped because her character is denied the freedom to make natural choices; at every moment, her actions are dictated by the artificial demands of the plot.

It's a shame the filmmakers didn't take a longer, harder look at this material. The movie's most interesting character is the older bartender, superbly played by Brown, who never has a false moment. If the film had been told from his point of view, it would have been a lot more interesting, but box-office considerations no doubt required the center of gravity to shift to Cruise and Shue.

One of the weirdest things about "Cocktail"' is the so-called message it thinks it contains. Cruise is painted throughout the film as a cynical, success-oriented 1980s materialist who wants only to meet a rich woman and own his own bar. That's why Shue doesn't tell him at first that she's rich. Toward the end of the movie, there's a scene where he allegedly chooses love over money, but then, a few months later, he is the owner and operator of his own slick Manhattan singles bar.

How did he finance it? There's a throwaway line about how he got some money from his uncle, a subsistence-level bartender who can't even afford a late-model car. Sure. It costs a fortune to open a slick singles bar in Manhattan, and so we are left with the assumption that Cruise's rich father-in-law came through with the financing. If the movie didn't want to leave that impression, it shouldn't have ended with the scene in the bar. But then this is the kind of movie that uses Cruise's materialism as a target all through the story and then rewards him for it at the end. The more you think about what really happens in "Cocktail," the more you realize how empty and fabricated it really is.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Cocktail (1988)

100 minutes

Laurence Luckinbill as Mr. Mooney

Tom Cruise as Brian Flanagan

Lisa Banes as Bonnie

Elisabeth Shue as Jordan Mooney

Bryan Brown as Doug Coughlin

Produced by

• Robert W. Cort

Directed by

• Roger Donaldson

Screenplay by

• Heywood Gould

Photographed by

• Dean Semler
• Neil Travis
• J. Peter Robinson

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Cocktail (1988)

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• Chicago Tribune Dave Kehr Cocktail is a meandering, shapeless film, without the force of character to resist any of the cliches that come its way.
• Chicago Tribune Gene Siskel Cruise is beguiling with his smile and his swagger, but the script doesn't take us anywhere fresh when it leaves the barroom.
• Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey It may not be a megaton bomb, but Cocktail is definitely of the Molotov type.
• Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert The more you think about what really happens in Cocktail, the more you realize how empty and fabricated it really is.
• People Magazine Peter Travers As if realizing that his star hasn't smiled for 15 minutes, Donaldson tacks on a goody-goody ending that would shame the Care Bears. How to sum up what went wrong? Cruise has a line in the movie: "Flat beer from rusty pipes."
• TIME Magazine Richard Corliss Cocktail is a bottle of rotgut in a Dom Perignon box.
• Los Angeles Times Sheila Benson The pairing of old-hand Brown and young-hand Cruise may have been meant to remind us of Cruise and Paul Newman; if so, think of this as The Color of Counterfeit Money.
• Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum Very, very stupid.
• Orlando Sentinel Jay Boyar This vacant, misshapen film is basically an extended beer commercial that presents the world as a ludicrous place populated by sex-and-cash-and-booze-crazed zomboids. Cruise, meanwhile, comes off as a somewhat taller Spuds MacKenzie.
• Variety Variety Staff Contains nary a surprise.
• New York Times Vincent Canby It is an inane romantic drama that only a very young, very naive bartender could love. How it got that way is difficult to understand.
• Washington Post Rita Kempley Cocktail is mud in your eye.
• Gannett News Service Jack Garner Ultimately, the ideas in this film fall as flat as stale beer and honest emotions are as watered down as cheap whiskey. This Cocktail is definitely on the rocks.
• United Press International Cathy Burke Cocktail is so steeped in corn, the drama seems comedic and the comedy is about as funny as a hangover.
• TV Guide TV Guide Staff With no fewer than 17 of Donaldson's favorite rock songs and a complete lack of dramatic impetus, Cocktail would fare better as an extended-play music video.
• Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt If some other drug were treated this way in a movie, lots of outraged people -- including parents and politicians -- would be up in arms. But it's only alcohol, the reasoning seems to go, so it's all harmless fun.
• Movie Metropolis James Plath It's the bartending antics and musical backdrops that make the film entertaining. Without them, "Cocktail" is just another beer gone flat.
• Philadelphia Daily News Ben Yagoda The philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote a book about the banality of evil. After seeing Cocktail, I want to write one about the evil of banality.
• South Florida Sun-Sentinel Roger Hurlburt Cruise's name on the marquee is plenty to insure the success of the film, even if it is lopsided, shallow, and slips the audience a Mickey Finn at the outset.

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Good Housekeeping

Every Tom Cruise Movie, Ranked

Posted: August 2, 2023 | Last updated: October 24, 2023

In 1981, Tom Cruise, who may be the last real movie star , made his first on-screen appearance shirtless, wearing a pair of cut-off shorts and bragging about starting s*** on fire. Since then, he's led an illustrious career, remaining one of Hollywood's last bankable action stars (in 2012, he was the highest paid man in the business). He has a work ethic like no other, refusing to hire stunt men to perform stunts in his movies, instead, Cruise will train for years to learn his own stunts so they look more real on the big screen for the audience. Now, approaching his 60s, the guy is still hanging onto to the side airplanes , climbing the world's tallest building, flying navy airplanes, running (oh, so much running), and leading one of the best action franchises of all time, Mission Impossible, that's not about superheroes. These are the best Tom Cruise roles of all time, ranked from worst to best.

43) The Mummy

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A movie so bad, it was the first and last entry in Universal’s planned monster movie cinematic universe.

42) Rock of Ages

In this extremely unfortunate musical about ‘80s hair metal, Tom Cruise plays a karaoke version of a rock and roll god named Stacee Jaxx.

41) Losin' It

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Released the same year as Risky Business , Tom Cruise plays the hunk in this high school sex comedy that time forgot. Get it? They’re "losin’ it"—as in their virginity.

40) Endless Love

In his first on-screen appearance, Tom Cruise is some random shirtless kid in Daisy Dukes bragging about being a pyromaniac.

39) Lions for Lambs

Nearly a decade before Trump coined the term “Fake News,” Tom Cruise plays a morally corrupt senator making a presidential bid by planting a story through a journalist played by Meryl Streep. In the end, this pretentious and convoluted plot says very little about its moving parts.

38) Jack Reacher: Never Go Back

Though the tagline warns to never go back, Cruise unfortunately did go back to play the titular Jack Reacher, in a sequel that plays out like dumb, less tech-savvy Mission: Impossible.

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Tom Cruise and Mia Sara try to protect the last of the unicorns from Tim Curry, who is some sort of awesome devil muppet. It’s also the only straight-up fantasy movie Cruise has ever done—and it’s pretty obvious why.

36) Far and Away

Seven years before they co-starred in Eyes Wide Shut (and two years after their wedding), Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman played star-crossed lovers and Irish immigrants trying to make it in America.

35) Oblivion

In this post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller, Cruise is a drone repairman who’s also into American sports. When he finds a group of survivors (led by Morgan Freeman), he begins to question the nature of his entire reality. As always, Cruise holds down what is otherwise a pretty clunky plot.

34) Valkyrie

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Tom Cruise plays a German officer with an American accent who leads a group of German soldiers with British accents in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler during WWII. It’s based on an actual military plot that could have entered some intriguing territory, had it not settled for being average historical escapism.

33) Knight and Day

In this action comedy, Cruise is once again a secret agent who accidentally ropes Cameron Diaz into an international conspiracy. For all his macho spy stuff, Cruise proves in Knight and Day that he can take this hero stuff lightly too.

32) Mission: Impossible II

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The worst of Cruise’s six Mission: Impossible movies, this one sees Ethan Hunt trying to stop a deadly weaponized virus that’s going to be released by terrorists. Unfortunately, director John Woo’s style didn’t quite fit with the international espionage of this franchise.

31) Jack Reacher

In his first of two movies playing the titular former military police-officer-turned-vigilante-drifter, Cruise’s character tries to stop a military sniper on a killing spree. Of course, Cruise also did all his own driving stunts.

30) The Outsiders

Coming down from the golden phase of his career, Francis Ford Coppola assembled an incredible upcoming cast for The Outsiders that included Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio, and Diane Lane.

In his second-ever onscreen role, Cruise plays David Shawn, one of the military cadets who attempt to protect their academy from being torn down for local condo developers. Pretty low stakes as far as military dramas go.

28) War of the Worlds

In this Steven Spielberg re-imagining of the H.G. Wells novel, Cruise plays a father attempting to keep his children safe throughout an alien invasion. Though it has all the highlights of a Spielbergian sci-fi, it wasn’t quite enough to cause riots like Orson Welles’s infamous radio broadcast.

27) The Last Samurai

A white savior complex brings down what is otherwise a well-acted period period piece about an American Civil War veteran sent to train a 19th century Japanese army.

26) Mission: Impossible III

Before he was put in charge of both Star Wars and Star Trek , J.J. Abrams’s big Hollywood blockbuster movie directorial debut was at the helm of Mission: Impossible III , which saw a retired Ethan Hunt brought back in the game to stop an excellent Philip Seymour Hoffman.

25) Vanilla Sky

Cruise stars in this philosophical thriller as a man haunted by the specter of a former flame after becoming disfigured in a car crash. (Fun fact: Penelope Cruz plays the same character in this remake of her Spanish film, Abre los Ojos .)

24) Days of Thunder

NASCAR moved into the mainstream thanks to this movie in which Cruise plays a promising driver hoping to making it in the big leagues.

23) All the Right Moves

Cruise plays a hot-headed high school football player hoping for a college scholarship in order to break out his small town.

22) American Made

He might be a bankable Hollywood hero, but Cruise proves in American Made that he can be a beloved anti-hero as well. He plays real-life Barry Seal, the airline pilot who became a drug smuggler and DEA informant.

21) The Color of Money

Paul Newman returns in this sequel to The Hustler as a retired pool shark who takes on a young prodigy (Cruise) as an apprentice of sorts.

20) The Firm

Cruise plays a young lawyer who discovers that his new law firm is working for the mob in this big-screen adaptation of John Grisham's novel.

19) Tropic Thunder

An unrecognizable Cruise steals the show in this Hollywood satire, playing an angry movie exec behind the most expensive war movie ever made.

18) Collateral

As a hitman who forces his cab driver to escort him to his various targets, Cruise handles the villain role quite well in Michael Mann's thriller.

17) Cocktail

It's essentially Top Gun in a bar. But it's still Peak Cocky Tom Cruise, and that's not a terrible thing.

16) Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation

After decades as one of the great American action stars, the Mission: Impossible franchise might prove to be Cruise’s greatest legacy, providing consistently top-tier entertainment. In this fifth film in the franchise, Hunt must get the now-disbanded IMF back together to stop an international network of skilled terrorists.

15) Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol

Cruise pulled off one of the most insane stunts of his career when he scaled the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on Earth. He filmed that entire scene hanging 2,722 feet above the ground.

14) A Few Good Men

Cruise stars as a military lawyer set on uncovering a conspiracy that left a marine dead, but is overshadowed by Jack Nicholson (who wouldn't be?).

13) Rain Man

Cruise plays a crook who learns how to be an empathetic, grown-up man thanks to his autistic brother in this Oscar-winning comic drama.

12) Eyes Wide Shut

Stanley Kubrick's last film starred Cruise and then-wife Nicole Kidman as a couple whose sexual fantasies uncover dark truths about each other.

11) Interview With the Vampire

Cruise played a villain for the first time, donning ruffled shirts and blond hair as the immortal and immoral vampire Lestat.

10) Minority Report

Cruise plays a futuristic cop who hunts down criminals before they commit murder—that is until he's accused of planning to kill someone himself.

9) Born on the Fourth of July

Oliver Stone's adaptation of Ron Kovic's book features Cruise's first great performance as a Vietnam vet turned anti-war activist.

8) Edge of Tomorrow

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If Groundhog Day had machine guns and aliens, it'd be this ridiculously fun and sorely overlooked sci-fi action hybrid in which Cruise is stuck on a constant loop (and often hilariously dying in battle).

7) Mission: Impossible — Fallout

In the sixth installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise, Tom Cruise risks life and limb—literally—for some of the most incredible action scenes of his entire career. He actually does the impossible: keeping this series not only fresh, but groundbreaking, as the IMF team fights to stop multiple nuclear attacks. Watching Tom perform the stunts in the film, and realizing what you're actually watching is real will make your jaw drop in disbelief.

6) Magnolia

Cruise is a standout in Paul Thomas Anderson's ensemble-drive morality play, playing a despicable pick-up artist with a sensitive side that's overshadowed by his raunchy bravado.

5) Mission: Impossible

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Brian De Palma's thriller is taut and twisted, and it's the movie that launched Cruise's career as a full-fledged action star.

4) Top Gun: Maverick

A sequel that was worth the 36-year wait. In true Tom Cruise fashion, he insisted his co stars train to actually fly the planes used in the movie, making his enthusiasm for movies that much more admirable. This film has it all: heart, action, great acting and complete storytelling. You don't have to be a fan of the original Top Gun to enjoy this movie but, surely you will tear up and be on the edge of your seat during several scenes.

3) Jerry Maguire

Part rom-com, part introspective drama, this Cameron Crowe film proved Cruise could be a grown up and still be a desirable leading man.

2) Risky Business

Cruise's breakout role is still one of his most iconic performances. Don't tell us you've never tried to recreate his dance moves.

The essential Tom Cruise role, and one that defined a character archetype of its own. Every young actor dreams of playing a guy like Maverick.

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