Tom Cruise is stuck in a holding pattern of total heroism and diminishing artistic returns, and he badly needs to break out of it. Look at the last decade of his work: he’s been almost tediously unstoppable. He has had three outings as the indestructible, comically resourceful and courageous Ethan Hunt in three of the Mission: Impossibles (with another one in the pipeline for next summer). He has played Lee Child’s tough and indefatigable loner action hero Jack Reacher. Plus, he was another super-heroic secret agent in Knight and Day, he went to war against the off-world 1% in Oblivion and took on Hitler himself in Valkyrie. But even he couldn’t nail the Führer. It was a rare day of failure for TC.

And he is not changing gears any time soon, judging by The Mummy, which sees him again face down the direst kinds of antagonists, no doubt with panache and a megawatt smile. However, perhaps his other summer release, American Made, in which he plays the infamous pilot-turned-drug-smuggler Barry Seal, will offer some relief from this horrorshow hero-show. It promises us a Cruise not coasting on the fumes of his own radness, but one actually giving a performance. We may be in for one of his more venturesome outings.

Cruise was a hard-charging actor from the minute he arrived in Hollywood. The first time I noticed him was in Taps, a kind of right-wing 1981 remake of If… in which student cadets take over their military academy. Cruise played the most fanatical of the insurgents, in a screaming, red-faced performance that came dangerously close to unintentional comedy. But you couldn’t deny the forces galvanising that young actor – ones that would resurface throughout his career.

It’s part of what I’ve always admired about Cruise. He is a total professional, and never slacks off, even for a second, when he knows his name is on the marquee. But hey, Tom, lighten up some.

Because when he does switch gears and cut against the grain of his screen persona, the results can be magical. Think of his performance as the malevolent sex guru Frank TJ Mackey in Magnolia, a perfect example of casting against type (the sort his director Paul Thomas Anderson pulled off with Burt Reynolds and Adam Sandler in other films). Mackey is a monstrous misogynist, leading all-male seminars in female domination and lying your way to getting laid, and Cruise relishes the chance to trash his clean-cut image. He also gets to stretch himself as an actor in scenes with his father, played by Jason Robards, and his work was widely and justifiably praised.

High note … Cruise in Rock of Ages. Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock

Then there is his bravura turn in Tropic Thunder as aptly named studio honcho Les Grossman, in his baldie wig, fat suit and grotesquely retrograde attitudes to his employees. (“Punch that director very hard in the face!”) Grossman/Cruise also grinds out a nifty and sleazy set of corpulent dance moves that so delighted the film-makers that they let him shake it for the entire end-credit sequence. It offers a link to Cruise’s grandiose, heroically shirtless poodle-rocker in the jukebox musical Rock of Ages. Turns out he’s a triple threat: actor in Magnolia, dancer in Tropic, singer in Rock!

That brings us to Collateral, easily my favourite Cruise movie – and one of my favourite movies, period. At first glance it looks like standard heroic Cruise fare. His character Vincent is resourceful, tough, relentless, unstoppable – the usual TC profile. But there’s one crucial difference: Vincent is the villain.

Machine-like, soulless and perfect … Tom Cruise with Jamie Foxx in Collateral. Photograph: AP

Cruise should do this kind of role a lot more often. Half of filmgoers already hate him, so why not put that animosity to work? His casting in Collateral is perfect: Vincent is the machine-like, soulless professional we sometimes mistake Cruise for – silver-suited, silver-haired, he’s a ghost and an authentic monster. He has a self-help weltanschauung – very Nietzschean-Darwinian-Hobbesian, but coherent enough, like Scientology – that he slowly decants into the mind of the driver (Jamie Foxx) whose taxi he has commandeered for a night of murders across Los Angeles, not realising that this kind of life-coaching will give Foxx exactly the mindset he’ll need to fight back and destroy Vincent. I cannot imagine another actor bringing so much to the part as Cruise does, not just in terms of talent, but in terms of self-image.

So here’s hoping that American Made offers an antidote to the bland super-heroics of The Mummy. And to the actor himself, may I make one suggestion? Mr Cruise, in a world of Toms, be a Vincent.