'Top Gun: Maverick' Is the Perfect Adrenaline Rush
Tom Cruise's sequel brings the charms of the original classic into the modern era.
What does it take to make a great action drama? Fighter jets. Kenny Loggins music. Tom Cruise. In 1986, Top Gun, perhaps the ultimate "guys being dudes" action movie set within a training school for the Navy's best fighter pilots, patented this formula, and added in a bunch of sweaty guys playing beach volleyball and an iconic love scene to seal the deal. Top Gun's massive popularity made the announcement of a sequel seem the most natural thing in the world, if not the most exciting: an elder Tom Cruise handing the reins off to a new generation of elite actors. If that's what you're expecting, you're in for a surprise. Top Gun is a classic. Top Gun: Maverick does everything Top Gun did and more.
It's been thirty-six years since Captain Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Tom Cruise) completed his TOPGUN program, but he's far from the decorated officer he was destined to become by the end of the first movie. He's dodged every promotion he could dodge, working as a test pilot flying hypersonic stealth jets for the military, but the specter of unmanned drones looms ever closer, spelling the end for an entire era of warfare. Not so fast, though—Maverick is called back to a certain fighter training school as an instructor, tasked with putting together a team of the best of the best to complete a bombing run involving some absurdly complex flying maneuvers at high speed much too close to the ground in enemy territory. If you will, an impossible mission.
The new crop of airmen, now flying F/A-18 Hornets instead of F-14 Tomcats, are kids in Maverick's eyes, and he shows up to teach them what's what, inventing training exercises to test their mettle and teach them how to fly as a team. It's not going to be easy, with the egos of pilots like "Hangman" (Glen Powell), "Fanboy" (Danny Ramirez), "Coyote" (Greg Tarzan Davis) and "Phoenix" (Monica Barbaro) repeatedly clashing as they struggle to work together. And there are two more problems: He only has a few weeks to train these kiddos up to fly a mission from which they might not all return, and one of his students, sullen Lieutenant Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw (Miles Teller), is the son of Maverick's old flying partner Goose, who tragically died in the first movie. Not to mention reconnecting with an old flame, single mother Penny (Jennifer Connelly), who manages the local bar and is not about to fall yet again for a guy who's left her more than once. You see where this is going.
The movie begins with a collection of the greatest hits of its predecessor, including but not limited to a montage of jets landing on an aircraft carrier lit by the golden light of the sun, Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone," and Maverick defying orders to do something with an aircraft that nobody's ever done before. This is, after all, a movie that will have more than a few similarities to the one that came before. After that, though, the engines kick into gear (I apologize if this car metaphor doesn't also work for planes), and Top Gun: Maverick starts to try out a few new tricks.
The interpersonal relationships between the characters are fun and fully realized (Maverick's perpetual battle of egos with his commanding officer, a Vice Admiral known as "Cyclone" (Jon Hamm) is a highlight) and there's just enough downtime between white-knuckle action to really get to know everyone. The sweaty beach game returns, but the macho posturing is toned down, given that we live in a new millennium and one of the main pilots is a woman. Val Kilmer reprises his "Iceman" for a touching scene. All of this is complemented by unbelievable flying sequences that will genuinely leave you breathless, each lightning-fast dogfight game and training simulation grander and faster than the last. This is the type of film to see as big and loud as possible.
But, as the original was, Top Gun: Maverick is also simply a straight-up great time at the movies. It makes the act of being a good movie look like the easiest thing in the world, with director Joseph Kosinski showing off everything he's got. (Yes, you should give Tron: Legacy another shot.) Because "the enemy" is never named, as in the first movie, it is comfortably apolitical (if you disregard the fact that the jets Maverick eventually goes up against are Russian, and what a boon the original Top Gun was for U.S. military recruitment programs), and even though the whole movie is working towards a life-or-death wartime mission, it never forgets that its purpose is to thrill and excite. Great action movies aren't going anywhere any time soon. Like a good wingman, Top Gun: Maverick swoops in to save the day.