Tom Cruise does it again with Top Gun: Maverick

Tom Cruise — just like Pete “Maverick” Mitchell — battles obsolescence with tropes and cheese in Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick, but his absolute commitment to analog spectacle is exhilarating; real actors in real planes equals real fun, and it’s unlike anything you’ve seen. Leaving its predecessor in the dust with visceral, aerial daring, Top Gun: Maverick puts you right in the cockpit of one of the year’s best action films. Minor spoilers ahead…

With my fondness for it buoyed by childhood nostalgia and an undying affection for Tony Scott, sometimes I find it difficult to recall that - in spite of its ludicrous macho posturing, glistening homoeroticism, and a fist-pumping Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” - the original Top Gun isn’t quite as good as I remember. Through its veneer of sun-baked 80s glory and an uncomplicated Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer flavor, it’s easy to overlook the cracks in this inert story about one of the best ace pilots in the Navy who turns out to be a crummy airman, a bad team player, and an even-worse wingman through sheer recklessness and arrogance. Even amidst its revolutionary, adrenaline-coarsing capture of dogfights, Top Gun is just low-stakes cheese with a sprinkling of entertaining, jingoistic dick-measuring. Flash-forward 36 years, and the hokum and narcissism make a triumphant return in Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick, but by combining its tropes with Tom Cruise’s iron-willed need to entertain us in the most dangerous, analog way possible, this is the rare sequel that leaves its predecessor in the hangar, eating dust. To put it quite simply, Top Gun: Maverick is one of the most viscerally thrilling action movies in years.

Top Gun: Maverick isn’t one to flatter your intelligence; very much like the original, Kosinski’s sequel rocks with a barebones narrative and another no-name foreign enemy, but this time, there’s an actual threat: An unidentified nation flouts a NATO treaty with an illegal uranium enrichment plant, and it’s up to a crack squad of the Navy’s best pilots to blow it to smithereens before it becomes operational. Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer), now an admiral, recommends Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) as the instructor to whittle down an elite team from the Top Gun program, much to the chagrin of Vice Admiral “Cyclone” (Jon Hamm). Still haunted by the death of his wingman “Goose” almost 40 years ago, Mitchell has coasted along as a test pilot for the Navy ever since, dodging promotion and the program’s looming obsolescence with his trademark recklessness. With only three weeks to train and select pilots to fly an absurd gauntlet rife with low-altitude canyons, surface-to-air missiles, and a face-shredding climb, “Maverick” intends to put his class through the ringer to prepare them for the most dangerous mission of their lives. His charges are a new generation of hubristic dick-swingers, including a cocky “Iceman” pastiche in “Hangman” (Glen Powell) and - of course - Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), son of the late “Goose,” who shares a complicated relationship with Mitchell.

“…by combining its tropes with Tom Cruise’s iron-willed need to entertain us in the most dangerous, analog way possible, this is the rare sequel that leaves its predecessor eating dust.”

“The future is coming,” Admiral Cain (Ed Harris) bellows at one point. “And you’re not in it.” At its core, Maverick is a blistering metaphor for the movie star, or more specifically, Tom Cruise’s hyper-particular brand of death-defying superstardom. The film opens with a fateful test run for an experimental manned jet. On the cusp of being shuttered in favor of the Navy’s newer, shinier remote toys, the program is saved by the skin of its teeth by Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, obliterating the Mach 10 threshold required to keep the plane in development and its team employed. Much like Mitchell, Cruise is a relic, an action-star vanguard of analog stuntwork that has seen him scaling the Burj Khalifa and hanging off the side of planes purely for our entertainment. And also like Mitchell, who advocates for the resilience of in-the-thick-of-it human instinct over drones and artificial intelligence, Cruise proves time and time again that the old ways are indeed better in an industry that frowns upon his dinosaur ways.

With Top Gun: Maverick, the proof is in the pudding: by placing himself and his co-stars in real jets and real aerial situations, Cruise - in awe-inspiring cohesion with director Joseph Kosinski, DP Claudio Miranda, and editor Eddie Hamilton - delivers some of the most rip-roaring action you’ll ever see from inside a cockpit. With large format cameras capturing the claustrophobia, freneticism, and the actual face-melting G-forces of daredevil flight, the in-air footage undoubtedly puts green screens and digital fakery to shame. And unlike its predecessor, Maverick’s thrilling setpieces come early, come often, and feel astonishingly truthful; careening from its bombastic training exercises to a final, nail-biting assault on the enemy with your butts nailed to your seats and your hearts in your throat, there’s no mistaking the film’s real-life lunacy in the air for anything else.

“At its core, *Maverick* is a blistering metaphor for the movie star, or more specifically, Tom Cruise’s hyper-particular brand of death-defying superstardom.”

Its script, authored by Ehren Kruger, Christopher McQuarrie, and Eric Warren Singer, is bare, but Top Gun: Maverick is so flawlessly engineered - with its perfectly positioned peaks and valleys - that it’s the easiest thing in the world to overlook its undercooked romance (Jennifer Connelly filling in for the Kelly McGillis role) and its predictable emotional beats. With a swelling, triple-threat score by Harold Faltermayer, Hans Zimmer, and Lorne Balfe, Maverick dares you to remain stone-faced as it sonic-booms its way into the pantheon of great action flicks. There’s also just enough flesh on the bone of the new recruits to keep things fleet; a toothpick-chewing Glen Powell makes for a fine “Iceman” 2.0, Monica Barbaro’s “Phoenix” transcends tokenism with a palpable need to prove herself, and Miles Teller’s “Rooster” has just enough baggage to sell the movie’s most obviously telegraphed reconciliation.

When in doubt, leave it to Tom Cruise to pull the tired legacy sequel concept out of its tailspin. A tireless purveyor of rarefied action cinema, he can’t stop and won’t stop, even as he’s told that his ego is writing checks that his body can’t cash. Top Gun: Maverick is well-oiled machine of pure, visceral entertainment borne of a stubborn refusal to do anything the easy way. Like its eponymous ace, it’s a dying breed, but there’s no way it’s going out in gasps or sputters. Not while Tom Cruise still draws breath.