Tom Cruise is a mature action hero who’s surprisingly vulnerable in Top Gun: Maverick
Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
This is a sequel to Top Gun (1986), which has been avidly rewatched in the intervening years, but you don’t need to have seen the first movie to understand what drives this one: Tom Cruise’s twinkle. I don’t mean to suggest that the megastar doesn’t do some nicely layered acting here, or that 36 years have quite canceled the unapologetically militarist appeal of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. The lines in Maverick’s face suggest an earned, grizzled decency. You’d want this guy defending your country.
He’s a storied Navy pilot who’s still flying and has quietly settled for the rank of Captain. His immediate superior, Admiral Beau Simpson (Jon Hamm) believes he’s washed up and should quit. But Simpson is overruled by Rear Admiral Chester Cain (Ed Harris), who reluctantly concedes that Maverick is the right man to train a crack team for a dangerous combat mission.
Maverick still wears his reputation as a daring graduate of Top Gun, the elite Navy pilot training center, like an old flight jacket. Now, twelve new top-of-their-class graduates of Top Gun are assembled to ready themselves, in a tight three weeks, to pull off a daunting air raid. Along a craggy, frighteningly narrow mountain valley, they’re to fly in very low, bomb an enemy underground nuclear facility, then quickly zoom their F-18 Super Hornets up a perilously steep mountainside without being shot down by the enemy. Time allotted for the operation: a little over two minutes.
It’s a neatly intriguing set up, tidily laid out for us in vivid graphics, and the director, Joseph Kosinski, has cast a lively, photogenic group of actors to portray Maverick’s eager beaver jet jockeys. Maverick’s superiors hope the senior pilot’s legendary flight experience will win his much younger students’ respect, but the young pilots don’t give it easily. Most wary is Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), whose father flew with Maverick and lost his life by placing too much trust in the daredevil pilot. Rooster coldly informs Maverick he won’t make the same mistake.
Miles Teller is Rooster, a pilot with a roiling grievance in Top Gun: Maverick
Equally determined to make the grade are “Hangman” (Glen Powell), “Phoenix” (Monica Barbaro) and “Bob” (Lewis Pullman). Out of the team of twelve, four will carry out the mission. Well, actually, three. It’s no surprise that right before the “go” command, Maverick himself is ordered to lead the mission. Deepening the suspense, Rooster is chosen to be Maverick’s wingman. The last 45 minutes set character challenges for these two that I didn’t see coming.
Mesmerizing as all the impeccably shot aerial combat is, it’s Maverick the flight legend who keeps us wondering what will happen next. Cruise is the movie’s guiding force. He’s become not just a major star but a kind of principle in blockbuster moviemaking. Make your hero brave, but most of all, let him do no harm. Maverick is a badass and a good man in the same virile package. Would we fall for this idealism with another actor in the role? The movie’s visual pyrotechnics would still be as impressive, and the brilliant sound design would keep us as sharply attuned to the swerving aerial feats.
But throughout, Cruise wears Maverick as much as he plays him. It’s not just Maverick’s dilemmas that keep us guessing. It’s also wondering how Cruise, nearly 60 years old, keeps the man’s derring-do believable.
I’m not sure Cruise has ever been more likable, more relatable, than he is here. It’s not entirely a glamorous performance. He doesn’t rely on a killer smile. It’s a who would you want here instead of me smile. Especially when Maverick is mischievous, Cruise keeps an air of incorruptibility. He doesn’t give an audience room to mistrust him, as actor or character.
Kosinski, cinematographer Claudio Miranda and editor Chris Lebenzon bring impressive movie-making brio to the enterprise. The shots inside the cockpits had me leaning in my seat with the hairpin, upside down, bullet-dodging turns. This movie is built to astonish, not to shock, edited to startle, not merely to jolt.
We don’t need more movies like this – though imitators will surely try to harvest and replicate its bravado – but we certainly could use more movies made like this. It’s what used to be admiringly called an audience picture, aiming to tickle and inspire viewers, not stroke them, to instill wonder, not push buttons.
We all relish an exhilarating time at the movies, and I walked out of this picture without a shadow of a doubt that I wanted to see it again. It’s a rare thrill-fest that elevates people’s human skills above their mastery of gadgets. It turns on what they come to understand about one another, not on how much pain they can inflict until the other person gives in. And it does this on a scale that only movies can master. When was the last time you left a theater celebrating that?