cult film freak: TIMOTHY HUTTON WITH SEAN PENN AND TOM CRUISE IN 'TAPS'

Sean Penn and Giancarlo Esposito in TAPS Year: 1981 Rating: ****

Harold Becker's TAPS is perhaps the only movie where Tom Cruise isn't cheered at the end... in fact he's downright despised for what he causes, underlining how well this involving, thoroughly compelling yet somewhat farfetched military-academy drama fleshes out the characters, and there are many... but four really matter...

Cruise is the extreme military-minded David Shawn, fervently following orders of Timothy Hutton's Brian Moreland, whose initial catapulting mentor is first-billed George C. Scott, sharing first-act experience-filled monologues about the honorary tradition of the central location: an academy that's soon to be turned into condominiums...

Timothy Hutton and Tom Cruise in TAPS

After Scott's taken out, the movie's handed off to Hutton... torn between traditional values and more modern thinking... the latter underlined by passive, well-read sidekick Sean Penn as Alex Dwyer, provoking the most intense scenes either in reflective collaboration with or emotionally charged arguments (and one fist-fight) against both Hutton and Cruise during the academy's intensely-plotted takeover...

An edgy template playing-out similar to a bank robbery hostage thriller (with Ronny Cox the lawman negotiator), without hostages, yet the suspense relies on which of the other students... including Giancarlo Esposito, Billy Van Zandt and Evan Handler... will follow Hutton's idealistically-burdened/emotionally-charged plight that, whether in bursts of intense action or slow-building tension, keeps the audience guessing until the end — where Tom Cruise proved he could play a worthy antagonist before rocketing into heroic superstardom.