Cocktail

1988

1h 44m

IMDb RATING

6.1/10

1.6K

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Romance

Drama

Comedy

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.

Directors

Roger Donaldson

Writers

Heywood Gould(screenplay by)

Stars

Tom Cruise

Bryan Brown

Elisabeth Shue

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Videos2

Trailer
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Photos48

Top cast

Tom Cruise

Brian Flanagan

Bryan Brown

Douglas "Doug" Coughlin

Jordan Mooney

Bonnie

Kerry Coughlin

Coral

Uncle Pat

Eleanor

Soldier

Soldier

Tourist

Richard Mooney

Finance Teacher

Eddie

Dulcey

Soldier

Soldier

Job Interviewer

Directors

Roger Donaldson

Writers

Heywood Gould(screenplay by)

All cast & crew

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Review

Featured review

7/10

**_Fun 80’s flick starts shallow, gets deeper_** Bent on financial success, a young ex-soldier (Tom Cruise) becomes an expert bartender in Manhattan while attending college in order to make it on Wall Street. Then a dream surfaces to establish a nightclub in Jamaica. Bryan Brown plays his cynical mentor while Elisabeth Shue and Lisa Banes are on hand as romantic interests. “Cocktail” (1988) is an entertaining Cruise-led 80’s flick that starts energetic, amusing and shallow but, thankfully, fleshes out the characters for something deeper. It’s fun in a snappy way, yet hindered by a feeling of unreality in the first half, which is resolved in the second. Brown is reminiscent of Michael Caine while Shue is in her prime, although her beauty isn’t fully captured as it was in “The Karate Kid” and the later “Leaving Las Vegas” (the fools). Laurence Luckinbill shows up in the last act; he would go on to superbly play Sybok in “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier” the next year. The ending is fine, but a bar is a bar, a place where people get soused. You can make a good living from it, sure, but does that benefit or deter humanity in the grand scheme of things? The film runs 1 hour, 43 minutes, and was shot in Toronto and Ocho Rios, Jamaica. GRADE: B

Wuchak10 Sep, 2023