Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
dir. Joseph Kosinski
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2022 Paramount Pictures
All I want to do is praise Top Gun: Maverick for being a slick and entertaining thrill-ride of a movie. It certainly is that. The action sequences are completely enthralling. The performances are mostly a lot of fun, too. Put all that together with the unrivaled screen magnetism of Tom Cruise – on the cusp of turning 60, Cruise still has plenty of charisma to burn – and Maverick should be a lock as the blockbuster action spectacle of the summer.
It undoubtedly will be. I can see this movie being one of those last-of-its-breed Hollywood event pictures that gives us the smallest whiff of the good old days, when one massive summer blockbuster – like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or Tim Burton’s Batman – made an entire moviegoing season, for both audiences and the studio’s accounting department. You know, the days before hyper fragmentation split the audience into a million pieces, when we had a shared, collective pop-culture experience – regrettably and admittedly, a non-inclusive, eye-wateringly white pop-culture experience.
Back then, the movie didn’t even have to be particularly good to rule the summer – like the 1998 attempt (starring Matthew Broderick, of all people) to reboot the classic franchise Godzilla – if only via merchandise sales and not necessarily by capturing the imagination of the masses. (This is where we’re slowly creeping with the MCU. Yes, every entry makes $100 kajrillion, but when was the last time people were still talking as much about an MCU movie at the end of its theatrical run as they we were at its beginning? End Game?)
If Maverick, the sequel to the 1986 action film PHENOMINON Top Gun, also starring Cruise, wasn’t made for me, then I am in the made-for-me-adjacent category. I turned seven the summer that Top Gun was released, so I was way too young to appreciate anything in the movie that wasn’t F-14 Tomcats doing incredible stunts, like flying upside down on top of another jet, so Mav could wave hello to the enemy. (I also had the soundtrack on cassette tape, and I still know almost every word to every song, as my wife can attest after we rewatched Top Gun in preparation for Maverick.)
Now that I’m older and (hopefully) wiser, I can watch the original Top Gun and see it for the cheesy, jingoistic two-hour commercial for the US military that it is. Aside from the improved storytelling, updated thrilling visual effects, and the filmmakers carefully straining out any hint of movie megacheese from the original, Maverick suffers from the same rah-rah American exceptionalism bullshit that plagues the first film.
The plot of Maverick is laughably thin. A rogue state – more on that later – is close to firing up a facility capable of enriching uranium, presumably to sell it to bad actors, or to use it for its own nefarious Black Hat purposes. The US government has decided that the most recent graduating class of Navy Top Gun pilots – the best of the best – will be tasked with destroying the facility.
There’s only one problem; this facility is located in treacherous mountainous terrain. It will be incredibly hard to get their fighter jets in and out of the mountain valley without being detected by the automated surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) guarding the area. Only one man can train these hotshots to fly dangerously low to the ground – in order to avoid the SAM radar – and to fly the excruciating 9.5 G-force acceleration required in order to get above the mountain on the exit side of the mission. That man is Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, last seen deciding to give teaching a try at the Top Gun academy in the final moments of the original movie.
We find out in the opening minutes of Maverick that Mav didn’t take to teaching. This American Übermensch only feels alive when he’s in the pilot seat, doing what only he can do. He’s resisted any promotion, preferring to stay lower in rank so that he can keep flying. His old nemesis, now friend, Tom “Iceman” Kazansky has risen to the rank of admiral, and he hand picks Maverick for the training assignment, because he knows Mav is the only one for the job. (Is it even a spoiler to announce that circumstance requires Maverick to end up flying the actual mission with his crop of trainees? It shouldn’t be.)
Director Joseph Kosinski – who directed the underwhelming franchise reboot Tron: Legacy, as well as the 2013 Tom Cruise vehicle Oblivion – and writers Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Christopher McQuarrie – another frequent Cruise collaborator who also wrote The Usual Suspects – put most of the fan service right up front. Within the first five minutes of the movie, we get the iconic Top Gun Anthem, a montage of jet pilots taking off and landing on an aircraft carrier, and Mav dramatically pulling a protective tarp off of his motorcycle so he can thrillingly race said motorcycle through the desert on his way to his new assignment.
There are other elements throughout the movie that are nakedly meant to give fans a nostalgic feeling. You can practically hear the movie insistently asking you at these points, “Don’t you remember how awesome this was in the first movie?!?”
Kosinski successfully threads a very tricky needle in these moments. He’s able to recreate them minus the cheesy ‘80s excess of the original. Top Gun: Maverick gives us a sunset drenched pickup game among the trainees on a gorgeous beach, for instance. This time it’s touch football instead of volleyball, and it’s missing (probably to some viewers’ dismay) the overtly homoerotic undertones of the equivalent sequence from the original, which Kenny Loggins’s track Playing with the Boys helped cement into queer-camp legend.
The 2022 version of the gratuitous 80s sex scene™ is practically chaste by comparison – the version in the first Top Gun is phenomenally cheesy, and takes special care to make us understand that Mav is a very tendah lovah. Not that I needed or wanted it to be, but in Maverick, the love scene, between Mav and Penny – a character we’ve never met, but with whom Mav has history – is infinitely classier. It doesn’t reek of titillation or satisfying base prurient urges.
The half-assed love interest subplot between Mav and Penny is easily the weakest thing about Top Gun: Maverick. That comes down to the writing, not the performances. Jennifer Connelly is as good as always as Mav’s new (and mostly age appropriate) love interest. You can feel while watching the movie that the five men responsible for the screenplay – Peter Craig and Justin Marks received “Story by” credit in addition to the three credited screenwriters – felt obligated to shoehorn in a love story.
It’s ironically delicious that the actor playing the love interest in the original film, Kelly McGillis, said the quiet part out loud when she surmised the reason that she wasn’t invited back for the sequel was because, “I’m old and I’m fat and I look age-appropriate for what my age is, and that is not what that whole scene is about.” (Connelly is 51 to McGillis’s 64.)
In contrast, the other major subplot within Maverick works splendidly. One of the elite pilots Mav is tasked with training is Lieutenant Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw. He’s the son of Mav’s best friend, Nick “Goose” Bradshaw, who died during his own Top Gun training program due to Mav’s fatal error in judgement in the first film. The screenwriters do excellent work building a history between the two men – they also do the same for Mav and Penny, but to lesser effect. We learn that Rooster is seething with anger at Mav for blocking his first attempt at getting into the Top Gun program. It set his career back years. What Rooster doesn’t know is that Mav did it because of a promise he made years ago to someone close to both himself and Rooster.
Miles Teller displays the same easy charm that made him so magnetic on screen in titles like Whiplash and The Spectacular Now. It’s akin to the same easy charm that actor Anthony Edwards put on display in the original Top Gun as Goose. The casting of Teller as Goose’s son is spot on. I don’t know who deserves credit for ensuring Rooster has Goose’s 80s-tastic mustache in Maverick, but it was an inspired choice.
The only other original cast member besides Tom Cruise to return for Maverick is Val Kilmer. It’s only for one scene, but it’s the most poignant five minutes or so of the movie. Within the film, Kilmer’s Iceman, now an admiral in the Navy, is suffering from debilitating health issues. He can barely speak above a whisper (and only does so for one or two lines) and uses a computer monitor and keyboard to communicate with Mav when the latter visits to discuss the mission.
Fiction and reality blur here, because The Hollywood Reporter confirmed in 2017 that Kilmer had battled throat cancer for two years. The multiple surgeries to combat the cancer left Kilmer almost completely unable to speak, and, since 2020, the actor has been using a feeding tube to eat. I can’t imagine how surreal it must have been for Kilmer to play an iconic character who is facing serious health issues that mirror the actor’s own. Thankfully, Kilmer has been cancer free for about six years, based on a 2020 announcement he made.
One of the unfortunate holdovers from the first film, the thing that gave it that bitter tang of jingoism and “trust us, we’re America” arrogance, survives intact in Maverick. As in Top Gun, the enemy that the Navy’s finest must confront are kept conspicuously faceless and even nameless. The evil country on the verge of ramping up production of enriched uranium is only ever referred to as “the enemy” or “the other side.” The filmmakers won’t even commit to geography. The characters in the movie only refer obliquely to “the region.”
The technological prowess of this nameless country which embodies pure evil – the US military says so, and how can we question that? They’re (read: we’re) the Good Guys! – even adapts to fit the level of how much we should fear them. Part of the reason this mission will be so hard is because “the enemy” has brand new 5th generation fighter jets that seemingly rival our own weapons of war. Conveniently, though, in the (admittedly) bravura action climax of the movie, this technological superiority disappears when some of our boys find an ancient F-14 Tomcat behind enemy lines that they can use for a daring escape.
It all feels very we’ll-defeat-Iraq-in-a-matter-of-days-because-they’re-so-outmatched-OH-SHIT-THEY-HAVE-WMDS-TRUST-US-WE’RE-THE-GOVERNMENT! This complete stripping of any nuance from the antagonist of the movie and the time-sensitive nature of the mission also carries with it a certain Jack Bauer stink of a ticking timebomb scenario. No need to worry about the humanity of the other side because ‘Merica is protecting liberty and Jesus, and that gives us permission to do whatever we want.
And please, no cries of “It’s just a movie.” That’s fine if we’re talking Star Wars, but as much as I enjoyed the action and the superb filmmaking of Top Gun: Maverick, like the first installment, this is a two-hour commercial for the US military, so it deserves much more scrutiny.
Since I mentioned Star Wars, I would be remiss in not pointing out that the ultimate plan for taking out this uranium facility bears a striking resemblance to one involving a certain thermal exhaust port. At one point, Mav tells Rooster not to think when the pressure is on. His skill is advanced enough that he can complete the mission via reflex alone. It sounds suspiciously close to Obi-Wan telling Luke to turn off his targeting computer and to use the force.
Despite almost all of my reservations, Top Gun: Maverick features some truly outstanding fighter jet action sequences. The press screening that I attended was held at an IMAX theater, and the energy and excitement that comes through on that bigger-than-life screen each time the characters soar into the sky is undeniably intoxicating. And that’s what both Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick are really after: a sensory overload of emotion that sweeps the audience up in pure adrenaline. It’s fine for a movie to lift us off the ground with its storytelling, but it’s equally important to ask hard questions about it once we get our feet back on the ground.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- The exhilaration of the fighter jet action sequences must be seen to be believed. So does the US military propaganda…
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Please let us all remember that Mav does what he does because to him it’s fun and the ultimate thrill, but his toys are designed and used to kill people.
- In the this-isn’t-as-cheesy-as-the-original category, the filmmakers figured out a way to make a Top Gun movie with 145% less sweat. While re-watching Top Gun, I estimated that it has the equivalent amount of sweat as The Rock in 2.5 Fast and Furious movies. That’s a lot of sweat.
- I didn’t talk about the performances from any of the other recruits for the mission because all of those characters are basically non-entities. People are going a little gaga over Glen Powell as Jake "Hangman" Seresin, the mission candidate who has an antagonistic relationship with Rooster, but it’s all smoke and mirrors. Every other mission candidate besides Rooster fades into the background. The worst thing about that is what they did to one of my Good Place favorites, Manny Jacinto. Not only does Jacinto not have a single line, he’s out of focus in the background in most of the shots. They done you dirty, Manny!
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Rae and I attended a press/promotional screening and it was close to packed. Every Top Gun fanboy must have shown up, because the raucous reaction from the crowd both during and after the movie (including applause during the credits) was overwhelmingly positive.