Tom Cruise as dockworker?

One of the problems with Tom Cruise is that he is NOT a great actor...
He is full of charisma, of course.
So when he leers and plays a vampire or a hotshot pilot, we believe him.
But too often, when he "acts" you think: "What a good actor"...

Michale Caine (who is in every movie known to mankind) once said: If you say: What a good actor, you are seeing the actor. If you see only the character, you are seeing a great actor.

So seeing Daniel day Lewis playing Christy Brown with Cerebral palsy, you say: What a good actor.
But if you see Dustin Hoffman in Rainman, you see a person with autism, not Dustin Hoffman. A great actor.

Tom Cruise is just not believable as a dockworker. He is too pretty. If he worked outside for ten years, he'd have bad skin, not the smooth skin of Hollywood. If he worked 12 hour days, he'd be paunchy from eating submarines or hamburgers and fries, for there is little time to sit down for a "real" meal, and you are just too tired to work out to get nice muscles.

This is not the first time Cruise was miscast. He was in one film about an Irishman and a British lady that ended up in Oklahoma...but the whole point was that she was older, and bossed him around...no way Cruise was the big handsome and somewhat inarticulate teenager of the film.

It's not as if there are no "working class heroes" in Hollywood...but I guess Sean Astin and Nicolas Cage or even Toby McGuire weren't available... in "old" hollywood, working class heroes actually had worked for a living: Think Charles Bronson (coal miner) or Clark Gable (steel worker). But at least Astin and Cage, who are hollywood brats, can act.

Or maybe Spielburg was so starstruck with the possibility that Cruise would star, he didn't bother to see if the part was miscast.