Top Gun: Maverick Review: Tom Cruise Kinetically Rides into the Danger Zone

Joseph Kosinski’s film fully surrenders to the grandiose fun that’s marked the best of Tom Cruise’s recent star vehicles.

Top Gun: Maverick
Photo: Paramount Pictures

Tony Scott’s Top Gun remains one of the quintessential cultural artifacts of Reagan-era America, a stultifying mix of latent homoeroticism and blatant jingoism. For all its goofy unseriousness, the film is essentially a recruitment ad for the Air Force. That it depicted combat aviation as the realm of hotshots engaged in air-to-air combat was an anachronism even in 1986, as dogfighting was all but obsolete by the end of the Korean War. It’s certainly all but nonexistent today, which is something that Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick has no choice but to admit. In this era of drone warfare, Peter “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is a walking museum piece, still flying well past the standard grounding age of a military aviator because he knows that when he retires, an entire era ends with him.

This unabashed nostalgia informs much of Maverick’s first half, from the narrative that mirrors that of the original film to the reused themes of Harold Faltermeyer’s old score. Callbacks to quotable lines and memorable moments from the original film are abundant here, with Maverick even finding himself back at the same elite fight training school from which he graduated, this time as an instructor. The man has been obligatorily tasked by his old comrade Iceman (Val Kilmer), now an admiral, to prepare a squadron for a high-risk mission to destroy a heavily fortified uranium refining facility being built in an enemy nation that, as was the case in the first Top Gun, is left unnamed yet strongly coded as Russia.

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Maverick feels slipshod as it teases narrative paths only to promptly put them back in its back pocket, like a “John Henry vs. the Steamhammer” showdown between the human element of aviation represented by Cruise’s all-American hero and the coming tide of entirely unmanned aircrafts. Kelly McGillis’s Charlie is also nowhere to be found, which forces the film to treat Jennifer Connelly’s Penny, a bartender and single mom, as a resonant blast from the man’s past.

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Things start to fall into place, though, when the story settles on Maverick’s discomfort with his instructor role and his lingering guilt over the death of Goose, his old wingman. It’s a wound that’s reopened when Goose’s son, Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), is brought into the Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program for being one of the Navy’s best pilots. Alas, these stories never attain the emotional resonance that they seem to be striving for. For one, Maverick’s interactions with Penny boil down to trite exchanges about his history of unreliability, while Rooster holds Maverick responsible for his father’s death despite himself being sufficiently trained to know better about the precarity of aerial combat.

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Kilmer’s brief cameo, in what has the feel of a swan song, carries far more weight than anything directly related to the story. The need to center Maverick also reduces the younger characters to background noise, which is unfortunate since the film is most interesting on the level of characterization when it spotlights the steeliness of Phoenix (Monica Barbaro) and the reckless arrogance of Hangman (a magnificently smarmy Glen Powell).

But the real draw here is, of course, the action, and Kosinski asserts his gift for large-scale filmmaking across the film’s runtime. The late Tony Scott was one of the great blockbuster directors of all time, but Top Gun was one of his least propulsive films, in part because it so blatantly intercuts shots of the actors sitting in cockpits with archival footage of fighter jets doing training exercises that the whole thing is drained of ferocity.

By contrast, Maverick comes to spectacular life whenever a wide-angle lens works to emphasize the g-force exerted on the human body during high-speed aerial maneuvers, the frame shaking not only as a reflection of the planes’ motions but of their pilots being pushed to the point of possibly blacking out. Whip-pans and fast edits capture the way that a supersonic jet can suddenly appear out of nowhere, and the film stresses, without succumbing to incoherence, how overwhelming and bewildering such lightning-fast combat can be.

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The film’s climax so thoroughly embraces the sheer kineticism of the action that it all but throws conventional physics to the wind. The mission itself is blatantly modeled on the Death Star trench run from Star Wars, and the final 20 minutes serve up the kind of gleeful absurdity that you expect from a Mission: Impossible movie. By decoupling the material from a more pointed global-political context, Maverick is perhaps no less a work of propaganda than the original Top Gun, but it fully surrenders to the grandiose fun that’s marked the best of Cruise’s recent star vehicles and reaffirms Kosinski as a blockbuster craftsman par excellence.

Score: 
 Cast: Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Val Kilmer, Monica Barbaro, Lewis Pullman, Jay Ellis, Ed Harris  Director: Joseph Kosinski  Screenwriter: Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, Christopher McQuarrie  Distributor: Paramount Pictures  Running Time: 131 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2022  Buy: Video

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

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