Top Gun: Maverick review – Took my breath away

There’s a mantra cited a few times by Tom Cruise’s titular Pete “Maverick” Mitchell throughout Top Gun: Maverick: “Don’t think, just do”. A fitting bit of advice for audiences who are contemplating watching this blockbuster sequel to one of the OG blockbusters.

I can attest emphatically that despite the 36-year gap between this and late director Tony Scott’s much-beloved machismo-fueled 1986 original – the film that launched Cruise into superstar status – there’s barely a step lost: the Kenny Loggins opening, the topless beach sports (the seemingly ageless 59-year-old Cruise somehow still holding his own against chiseled torsos half his age), helmet-less bike rides, and a nigh-godlike pilot bucking against authority at every turn. It’s all there.

However, Top Gun: Maverick has learned a few incredible new tricks (more about those later), to the point where there should be no hesitation from prospective filmgoers. What director Joseph Kosinski and star/producer/immortal mascot Cruise has given us here is a film that screams to be seen on the biggest screen you can get to as nothing else will do it justice. (The filmmakers know this, which is why it’s even prefaced by a little intro clip from Cruise thanking fans for seeing it in cinemas despite the pandemic).

That aforementioned Yoda-esque mantra is also meant for those already in the cinema, as the “don’t think” part relates to the film’s plot and characters. Much like the original, Top Gun: Maverick is laden with dialogue seemingly comprised entirely of poster taglines. Early scenes are often layered in so much cheese that characters like Glenn Powell’s dickish “Hangman” should come with an onscreen warning for audience members who are lactose intolerant. To be fair, that cheesiness in screenwriters Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Christopher McQuarrie’s script feels very much like a throwback of this film’s progenitor.

Said script, in this case, finding Cruise’s Maverick, after having spent the last 30 years failing to advance in rank beyond Captain due to his insubordinate nature, only still possessing a career thanks to the influence of his old wingman-turned-Navy commander Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer putting in a brief, but extremely emotional showing). Surprisingly though, “Mav” gets recalled to the Top Gun programme, this time as an instructor rather than a pilot, thanks to a time sensitive mission. “I’m not a teacher,” he protests, but due to being the only active pilot with the type of real world experience the mission requires, Navy brass order the anachronistic flyboy to rapidly train up a group of the very best hotshot pilots around, and select from this batch the six men and women expected to pull off a nigh impossible feat.

Requiring “two miracles” to succeed, there’s a good chance that these pilots aren’t making it home from this mission. That moral quagmire is made even gloopier due to one of the prospects being Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s ex RIO/co-pilot “Goose,” who tragically died in action during the events of the first film. Not only is Maverick still wracked with guilt over the part he played in Goose’s death, but now he might be sending his late friend’s son – who already resents Maverick – to his death as well.

That plot beat, as well as a throwaway romantic interest side story that painfully underutilizes Jennifer Connelly as local bar owner/ex flame Penny Benjamin (Kelly McGillis’s Charlie doesn’t even get a mention), and the aforementioned appearance of Kilmer’s Iceman, makes up the bulk of the drama in this film. The respective actors do fine here, but I can guarantee that those particular moments will not be responsible for the vast majority of the emotions you’ll be going through while watching Top Gun: Maverick.

For several years now, Cruise has seemingly been on a bonkers “suicide by film” quest, pushing the boundaries of action sequences through personal danger and complexity. And for Top Gun: Maverick, that meant flying F-18 fighter jets for real as far as possible (a failed feat attempted on the first film). Despite his insistence to the contrary, the Navy’s acceptance of this ludicrous scheme didn’t extend to Cruise and his co-stars actually manning the flight-stick during the hair-raising dogfighting, but for a lot of the other action, they’re really in the cockpit. The result is like an afterburner to the face. And by that I meant that you can literally see the actors’ faces melt and distort with the G-force of doing insane flips and rolls for real.

With that level of practical realism and Kosinski directing like a man possessed, engineering nerve-shredding scenarios, the action in Top Gun: Maverick soars into the stratosphere. The final 45 mins of this film is a sustained attack on your nervous system that hits with the impact of a Sidewinder missile barrage. Even when narrative twists are so obvious they would show up on a cursory radar sweep, you just don’t mind as you get blasted from one explosive set piece to the next. The action is so good, that even those earlier dairy-based transgressions are all but forgiven.

As I bobbed and weaved in my seat in tandem with Cruise being gravity-slapped around his cockpit on the IMAX screen, I lost count of the number of sustained expletives I uttered. Top Gun pilots are told to find their limits and push beyond them, and that is exactly what Cruise and Kosinski manage to do here for the genre. This is staggering action blockbuster filmmaking. For years we just sang about commuting to that fabled “Danger Zone” and now we actually get to see what really happens there. And it took my breath away.