Whatever you think of the man, you've gotta hand it to Tom Cruise the movie star. Over a 40-year career he's battled couches, motion-smoothing TVs, COVID set breaches and the spectre of professional obsolescence with a pathological zeal that's practically supernatural, channelling a brand of hotshot American idealism that's become almost endearing, or at least sufficiently cartoonish to be abstract.
He might be the hardest working man in (movie) show business, but if the critical buzz surrounding his 36-years-in-the-making sequel Top Gun: Maverick is any indication, he's about to be tasked with his biggest challenge yet: single-handedly rescuing the blockbuster from the clutches of IP-enamoured corporations and their superhero cheerleaders.
The movie that made Cruise a superstar, 1986's Top Gun is a quintessential artefact of Reaganite multiplex entertainment, a feature-length air force recruitment ad whose patriotic moves were offset by the seductiveness of its pitch – the magic-hour imagery, the sleek, Giorgio Moroder-produced soundtrack, the glistening homoeroticism mainlined in director Tony Scott's irresistible, MTV-era formalism.
Top Gun: Maverick opens as if it's still 1986, awash in Harold Faltermeyer's hairspray synth metal and Kenny Loggins' air show perennial Danger Zone, brazenly signalling its intent to play as a beat-for-beat recreation of its predecessor, an unfiltered rush of adrenaline.
Somewhere over the Mojave desert, Cruise's now middle-aged Captain Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell — aviators, leather jacket and star-spangled grin all intact — is clinging on as a supersonic test pilot for a spy plane program that's about to be folded in favour of drone warfare. He's an antique flyboy in the military ointment at a time when pilots are expendable; a movie star who still does their own stunts in the age of computer-generated body doubles.
Despite being a decorated pilot and a war hero, Maverick is still pissing off a stern Rear Admiral (Ed Harris) with his antics, like a frat boy razzing the stuffy college dean — a man-child whose reckless need for speed has kept his career grounded.
Nothing ages a character more than slipping into the costume of their youth, even someone wearing his years as well as Cruise; yesterday's tower-buzzing bad boy is today's nostalgia-ridden burnout, its yuppie teen pimp tomorrow's millionaire sex trafficker.
"The future is coming," growls the Rear Admiral, "and you're not in it."
Lucky for Maverick, and for us, he's got One Last Shot. At the behest of his old wingman and now navy Admiral, Iceman – reprised, in a touching and graceful appearance, by Val Kilmer – the ageing ace is sent back to the Top Gun academy to train the navy's best fighter pilots for a mission that requires his particular set of cockpit skills.
The assignment bears an unmissable, perhaps deliberate resemblance to the Death Star bombing mission in the original Star Wars: a squad of F/A-18 Super Hornet fighters, chosen for their radar-evading ability, have to fly low and fast through a mountain canyon and hit a tiny target in order to destroy a uranium plant in an unspecified location. With their shadowy planes, blacked-out helmets and made-up insignia, this faceless enemy might as well be Imperial TIE fighters, if not video game bogeymen.
Near the San Diego base, Maverick reconnects with an old flame, Penny — Jennifer Connelly, in a canny bit of fellow 1986 movie icon casting — who's on hand to tend bar, dispense backstory and reassure him that all his mistakes can be forgiven.
Everybody else could slide right in to a Cold War blockbuster: the base admirals (Jon Hamm, Charles Parnell) riding Maverick's ass; the cohort of cocky young fighter jockeys with call signs like Hangman (Glen Powell), Phoenix (Monica Barbaro) and Payback (Jay Ellis), whose towel-snapping banter would be right at home in a vintage James Cameron movie.
Also on the team: Lieutenant Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw (Miles Teller), son of Maverick's late co-pilot, Goose (Anthony Edwards, in flashback), wearing the moustache and Hawaiian shirts of his old man and still sore about his dad's death — a moment that continues to haunt Maverick, too.
With its electrifying action sequences and go-for-broke energy, Top Gun: Maverick is eager-to-please entertainment that throws back to the fist-pumping, star-powered blockbusters of Hollywood's 80s and 90s.
Whenever the movie is in the air, it's rousing, genuinely exhilarating stuff. The aerial sequences, filmed, at Cruise's insistence, without digital effects and using real planes — the actors trained for g-force conditions, and in many instances operated the cockpit cameras themselves — quicken the pulse in ways that most contemporary blockbusters could never approach.
Director Joseph Kosinski, who debuted with TRON: Legacy and helped goose Cruise's self-cloning fantasies in Oblivion, has a knack for finding the action's sweet centre of gravity. Top Gun: Maverick's dogfights pull you forward in your seat and push you back with the illusion of a flight simulator; the kind of immersive, first-person experience that — ironically, for a movie obsessed with analogue craft — is only replicated these days by virtual reality.
But elsewhere the movie strains to manufacture a sense of emotion or a moral reckoning with the passage of time, its superego writing cheques that its body can't — and doesn't want to — cash. It's too busy rocking and rolling; the allure of the action too strong, the haze of nostalgia too thick.
It's also a film that exists in a bubble of retrograde geopolitical fantasy, imagining the American military as underdogs and interventionist heroes, and oblivious — as any good throwback needs to be — to the complexities of the current global climate.
Playing at reconciliation between surrogate fathers and sons, Top Gun: Maverick is a movie for middle-aged men desperate for validation as good dads; for a nation that yearns to see itself restored as heroes on the global stage (it's no coincidence that Maverick's P-51 Mustang, the aerial star of World War II, features prominently and triumphantly in the film's visual design).
Cruise gets to be father and son, wise old vet and eternal youth: posing alongside both Rooster and Iceman as though time had collapsed in his presence; reclining with Connelly against a vintage Porsche like a forever-teenage bedroom pin-up.
Yet if the first Top Gun was already juvenile catnip for a generation of moviegoers weaned on video games and Star Wars, it also had an eroticism and relative gender complexity that the sequel refuses to touch.
Compare the former's relationship between Maverick and Kelly McGillis's older, more accomplished (and metatextually queer) flight instructor to the safe and sexless partnership with Connelly, a romance with all the chaste fumbling of an adolescent crush (at one point, Cruise even tumbles out of a second storey bedroom window, like a teenage boy on the run).
The late Tony Scott's elegant trashiness — his lurid, loaded imagery — is absent; a good-natured variation on the original's infamous beach volleyball scene could be a commercial for health insurance, while Hans Zimmer's generic, over-determined score has none of the delirious lift of Faltermeyer's LinnDrum-driven, air guitar-ready cheese. (Lady Gaga's bombastic contribution, while perfectly fine, is no Take My Breath Away; but you already knew that.)
For all of Top Gun: Maverick's breathless thrust, there's something disconcerting about its unwillingness to engage with anything beyond its feel-good vacuum.
Just as the Russian MiGs in Top Gun were really repainted American F-5s, Top Gun: Maverick leaves the impression that these characters, more than ever, are waging a war against no one but themselves — against time and fading youth; against notions of global power that are as worn through as the tape belt on a Walkman.
In this way Cruise really has rescued the blockbuster, even if it's less the future of cinema than the past in drag. Still — what a ride.
Top Gun: Maverick is in cinemas now.
