Top Gun: Maverick is jingoistic, ridiculous, and patently propaganda. It’s also fantastic. A piece of breath-taking, wholly engrossing blockbuster cinema. Reuniting the audience with Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell (Tom Cruise), the film centres on a planned US Navy strike on a uranium plant in some (purposefully vague) foreign country. Maverick, about to be grounded permanently for his outdated ideals, is saved from retirement when he is called back to Top Gun by no less than Iceman (Val Kilmer) himself. But Maverick isn’t there to fly – he’s there to teach.
Within minutes, the rule book literally goes in the bin. Maverick tells his new students that he intends to “find your limits and test them.” These young pilots consist of chiselled young men and women who collectively draw from a deep reservoir of witty quips as their primary means of communication. The straight white teeth, coiffed hair and shredded abs blur together a little. But amongst them is Bradley ‘Rooster’ Bradshaw (Miles Teller), son of Nick Bradshaw. Connoisseurs of Tony Scott’s original film will likely know the latter better as Goose, Maverick’s wingman who famously died in an ejector seat malfunction. As such, there’s history between Rooster and Maverick, and their fractious relationship is posited as the ‘heart’ of the movie.
Of course, it’s worth questioning whether a film this slick, this efficient, this ruthlessly mechanised can even have a heart. Watching it, I felt that it was the surrounding context as opposed to necessarily the film itself which generated much of the emotion that it managed to wring out of me in spite of my reluctance to give myself over to its (admittedly manifold) charms. If Top Gun was the film that made Tom Cruise, Top Gun: Maverick is rather transparently a film about what it’s like to be Tom Cruise now.
Perhaps more than anyone else in the industry, Tom Cruise wants to be the Greatest Movie Star Alive™ – maybe even one of the Greatest Ever™. When his squeaky-clean star image imploded some time in the mid-2000s, Cruise adopted a different tactic. His recent films seem to concede that yes, Tom Cruise is crazy, now let us make this work for you. In Top Gun: Maverick, we see him flying actual US navy planes. Every vertiginous angle is captured in jaw dropping IMAX. Cruise’s devotion to genuinely extraordinary stunt-work is wildly impressive no matter how much you might try and deny it. As a result of his stupidity/bravery, Top Gun: Maverick possesses a tactility and sense of genuine suspense.
Top Gun: Maverick is a film which will likely leave even the most discerning viewer powerless to resist. Cruise – who has always skirted the line between crazed and charismatic – turns his dazzling star power up to eleven. He delivers an effortless and genuinely vulnerable performance as a man who’s one of the last of his ilk. The metaphor is not subtle.
“Your kind is headed for extinction,” growls Ed Harris’ stern admiral during an early scene.
“That may be true, sir,” Cruise replies, his absurdly/endearingly toothy grin filling every inch of the huge cinema screen. “But not today.”
4/5