Bars have played vital roles in films such as “Star Wars” and virtually every Western but I don’t know if there has ever been a film about bartenders as such and after seeing “Cocktail” I hope there aren’t any others.

In “Cocktail”, we meet the cheeky Brian Flanagan (Tom Cruise “Top Gun”, “Mission: Impossible”), who comes to New York to make it big. After a series of unsuccessful interviews, he becomes a bartender and learns the trade from the eccentric Doug Coughlin (Bryan Brown). Soon Brian sees a bright future as he hopes to find love and open his own bar named ‘Cocktails And Dreams’.

Tom Cruise performance as the sarcastic Brian Flanagan is ruined by the fact that I’m convinced both he and Bryan Brown were drunk during the filming of this picture and the camera simply followed them around acting like idiots. The two do such unfunny and preposterous things that you can’t help but feel they’d had a pint to many and because of this after a while like any drunk they become a bore to watch and after that they just become a nuisance. The other characters are boring too, which of course means the film fails in this department.

“Cocktail” is a novelty film and it is really fun for twenty minutes but then it goes downhill quickly with only a few moments that prove to be mildly amusing. Had “Cocktail” been a short film then I could praise it for its kinetic energy and silly feel but the film just spirals into an uncontrollably bland experience that feels so similar to so many other lacklustre experiences. The whole film is just a variation on the first twenty minutes or so and gets weaker each time we reach a new variation. “Cocktail” didn’t do it for me at all.