The planes whoosh, Tom Cruise looks great, and Top Gun: Maverick is exactly what you’d expect.
The planes whoosh, Tom Cruise looks great, and Top Gun: Maverick is exactly what you’d expect.
T op Gun: Maverick didn’t take my breath away, mainly because it flies straight into the Comfort Zone. Sticking rigorously to the Eighties blockbuster formula and serving up thick slabs of nostalgia, Tom Cruise has given us all a proud, defiant Dad Movie for men in their 50s. It’s a reasonably effective action movie with reasonably exciting dogfights that sends you home going, “Well, that was exactly what I expected.”
This play-the-oldies effort even starts out by literally playing an oldie (Kenny Loggins’s “Danger Zone”), re-running the introductory info from the 1986 original, and restaging shots such as the one in which Maverick grins brightly enough to be visible from space while racing next to the runway on his motorcycle. Despite one of the most intriguing credits of the year — “Music by Harold Faltermeyer, Lady Gaga and Hans Zimmer” — the movie, blandly directed by Cruise’s handpicked choice Joseph Kosinski, makes no attempt to blend styles or adapt to the 21st century. I mostly approve; the movie makes no cringey effort to distance itself from the past with any of that, “You’re a dinosaur, James Bond, how dare you flirt with women” nonsense. Still, I couldn’t help thinking of the wrong 1986 movie: Back to School. Cruise is Rodney Dangerfield, except he doesn’t see the joke.
His idea is: What if you could just ignore reality, go back to your old school, and find that everyone was still singing the same classic rock songs you loved when you were 22? What if, instead of being wrinkly and irrelevant, you were still the center of attention and everyone wanted to party with you and talk about you and play shirtless homoerotic football with you on the beach?
Tom Cruise is now old enough to be the grandfather of a fighter pilot but — gotta be fair here — because he has kept himself in fantastic shape, he might be the only AARP cardholder who could pull off this role. He’ll be 60 in July, and yet he’s still (sort of) boyish, or at least he was four years ago, when Top Gun: Maverick started filming.
You know what’s going to happen every step of the way, and it’s fine. The first movie wasn’t interesting, so it would be a shock if this one were. This time, the goal is to blow up an underground uranium-enrichment plant in an (unidentified!) foreign country and then zip away before the enemy fighter jets get scrambled. What country is this? You’re meant to guess. For a movie about indomitable courage, Top Gun: Maverick is skittish about offending any potential overseas market, so it’s a bit murky who we’re fighting. We don’t even get a good look at the bandits’ faces or hear what language they’re using. Being terrified of offending anyone is the most 2020s aspect of the movie.
Despite being over the hill, Maverick, who is called back to duty at the Top Gun training center as a flight instructor, is clearly not going to stay at the chalkboard for very long. There will be a thinly developed love interest (Jennifer Connelly this time, as a cute bartender at the base in San Diego who loves dangerous high-speed sailing and drives a classic Porsche), and no other character around Maverick will accomplish much more than to shine a light on his awesomeness. Since Goose is dead, there will be a son of Goose (Miles Teller) wearing the same unfortunate mustache as Dad, and there will be some friction to deal with given that Maverick sort of got Goose killed, although son of Goose is more upset about Maverick having pulled him out of the Naval Academy. I am exceptionally grateful that at no time do Maverick and Son of Goose reenact the “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” scene.
Though the sequel is smoothly engineered, I didn’t feel any excitement or suspense, and even the twists (the same pull-the-rug-out device actually gets used twice in the climax) are straight off the shelf. One missed opportunity is the flat construction of the subsidiary figures. Cruise’s ego as producer means he tends to allow scripts to get larded up with lots of blather about the greatness of his character. Cruise brings in two wonderful actors — Ed Harris, as a crusty old admiral, and Jon Hamm, as a slightly younger crusty old admiral who is actually younger than Cruise — and both of them are effectively reduced to hall monitors who keep sputtering about how Maverick is breaking all the rules again, threatening to ground him, then eventually just bow to his sheer awesomeness. The earlier movie — made before Cruise had the power to orient everything around himself — had much more substantial supporting figures, notably Val Kilmer’s Iceman. Cruise is at least generous enough to give Kilmer a somewhat superfluous scene in the sequel, which factors in the actor’s sadly debilitated condition. (Stricken by throat cancer, Kilmer can barely speak anymore).
Having the world’s best fighter pilot be Cruise’s age is about as plausible as having the world’s best pitcher be his age, but — whatever! — Cruise is still Cruise. He does his thing, and his thing is to be America’s hero. You could argue he’s better at it, or at least more durable at it, than any star in Hollywood history. Besides, Cruise’s self-aggrandizement flatters us all: Subconsciously, he makes us feel younger. If he still looks nearly as good as he did 30 years ago, maybe the rest of us do, too?
