It’s not a tough argument to make in saying that Tom Cruise has lost some of his “cool” points in the past few years. Marrying Katie Holmes? That’s cool. Calling her “Kate” and going apesh*t on Oprah and acting nuts on The Today Show during an interview with Matt Lauer, pushing his religious views and a few other things he’s done recently? Definitely not as cool.
He needed something to help put him back into the spotlight for good reasons.
His role in the awesome “Collateral” was awesome. Valkyrie was really good.
His cameo in Tropic Thunder definitely put him back on the radar, but because he was decked out in a crazy outfit in which many people didn’t recognize him and the movie wasn’t a “Tom Cruise Vehicle”, he only had a certain amount of “cool points” he could build up through that role.
This summer he has at least two films coming out which look fairly good, but he needed to do something extra in order to really connect to the MTV crowd who might not know who he is, and if they do, some of them still wouldn’t care.
Enter the 2010 MTV Movie Awards.
Ed Helms (The Office, Hangover, The Goods) and Ken Jeong (Community, The Goods) showed up, with Helms playing the piano in a crazy cloud outfit and Jeong dancing in a made-for-a-woman leopard print outfit. Their weird-yet-amusing performance was interrupted by Tom Cruise, still in the get-up from Tropic Thunder which is now widely understood to be him, interrupting and telling Helms and Jeong to get off of his stage.
He then calls out Ludacris, requesting a beat – which Luda’ is more than happy to do (via well-timed pre-taped video response).
Cruise dances down onto the stage, performing his choreographed moves well, and you can paint me impressed.
But wait, there’s more.
**adsense_4block**
This is not a solo-star segment. Not in the least.
That’s right, he had a great 2-minute dance with Jennifer Lopez. To the point where I thought maybe someone else was dressed up to look like Tom Cruise in the Tropic Thunder garb. With Katie Holmes cheering from the audience, I have no doubt that it was Tom Cruise up there dancing with J-Lo, especially because a guy like Tom Cruise isn’t likely to have someone pretend to be him on stage like that just to get some “cool points” he didn’t actually earn.
His stock just went up, and I have a feeling that it’s going to seriously help promote his movies this summer with the MTV generation.
In case YouTube takes down the video I tried to link to, here are some images:
It’s a shame that the video you linked is already gone, because that dance they did was epic.