Legend (1986)

Film: Legend (1986)

Stars: Tom Cruise, Mia Sara, Tim Curry

Director: Ridley Scott

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Makeup)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Tom Cruise: click here to learn more about Mr. Cruise (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Tom Cruise's early career in many ways belies a lot of the stories we've talked about this season of people like Charles Bronson and Sylvester Stallone having to struggle in supporting roles for a while before they ended up as leading men.  Cruise after coming to Hollywood at the age of just 18, got a small role in Endless Love, but just a few months later had a plum role Taps from 20th Century Fox.  Quickly following this was the one-two-three punch of The Outsiders, All the Right Moves, and Risky Business.  All of these films turned a profit, but it was Risky Business, where Cruise's most famous scene would find him jamming out in his underwear to Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock-and-Roll" that would send him into the stratosphere.  The film made 10x its budget, and by-and-large, that was pretty much it for Cruise-he would be a movie star for the rest of his life (aware that saying this the same weekend his Oscar vehicle that is no longer such a thing Digger is bombing will feel cheeky, but let's be honest-he'll bounce back with a sequel to one of his many hits)...though it's possible that today's movie might've held threatened that dominance.  Cruise took one of only a few risks in his career (again, Digger being another) that didn't click with audiences in the spring of 1986 with Legend, a strange Ridley Scott fantasy-adventure that audiences hated.  Had this been an indication of where his career was going, he might've been more of an Emilio Estevez or Rob Lowe-style 1980's fixture...but just a month after Legend tanked at the domestic box office was the world premiere of Top Gun, which would become the highest-grossing film of 1986 and spawn Cruise's first franchise.

(Spoilers Ahead) But because I have seen Risky Business and Top Gun (and this series is about me discovering new films), and honestly because it didn't occur to me to watch The Outsiders even though that would've been a totally good choice for this...we're doing Legend.  The movie is about Jack (Cruise), a forest child who lives in a fantasy realm where darkness and winter are held off by two magical and precious unicorns.  At one point Jack's love interest, Princess Lili (Sara) attempts to touch one of the unicorns despite his protestations, and it runs off...and has its horn cut off by goblins.  They work for a character called Darkness (Curry), an evil demon of sorts who wants to slay both unicorns in hopes of bringing total darkness back to the world.  While Jack is working with wood elves and a fairy-in-disguise to help fix the unicorn (and protect the other one), Lili is taken captive by Darkness and made into her evil, sexy bride...but she eventually tricks him and frees the unicorn, who thanks to Jack helping to kill Darkness and connect the unicorn's horn to the horse, we see goodness brought back to the world.

Here's the deal-Legend is not much more than that plot.  The film has become something of a cult classic, as is oftentimes the case for fantasy films of the 1980's that bomb (see also The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth), particularly for Curry's campy portrayal of a roided out demon who is obsessively horny for Mia Sara's Lili.  So if you're going into it, you either need to be super into the aesthetic, or you really need to like the characters.  I wasn't very sold on the aesthetic, though Curry's Oscar-nominated makeup is making some solid points (and clearly influenced the future Hellboy movie design), but you have to buy hard into the somewhat homoerotic nature of the picture to really enjoy it on a camp level (between the excessive amount of glitter every character seems to wear to Cruise's 4" inseam shorts while still wearing a shiny gold breast plate, this is really doubling up with the volleyball scene in Top Gun in terms of awakening young gay men of 1986).

The characters are also super unlikable.  Curry's character is so underwritten that even an actor as skilled as he can't pull this totally off (though he's clearly having a blast in this role), but he's better than the other two.  Cruise's character is in love with Lili, but honestly you have no idea why as Lili is a spoiled brat, and doesn't change enough by the end to really justify the audience rooting for her.  The film itself apparently has three different endings; the one I saw had Jack & Lili ending up together but Darkness still lurking in the void, plotting his revenge, while there are others that don't have them end up together or any mention of Darkness still existing.  I personally think that the best option here would've been them staying apart, as Jack is magical in a way that Lili isn't, and they really don't make sense in the same world.  Either way, though, this sets up a weird sort of dichotomy because as we'll see in the next few weeks, both onscreen and in real-life, Cruise doesn't always get the girl.