TOP GUN: MAVERICK (2022) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

The original "Top Gun" was more of an event than a movie. Tom Cruise was, quite fittingly, an ascending Hollywood megastar when he made it, and its success was where he crested. In the decades that followed, Americans continued to see him break new records in Hollywood, particularly with his hugely successful "Mission: Impossible" franchise, and by now I've come to see him as the only movie star who transcends stardom. Tom Cruise produces. Tom Cruise sells. Tom Cruise insists that other actors keep their facial hair. Tom Cruise performs his own stunts. In 2022, Tom Cruise is the event.

Nowhere is this more evident than in "Top Gun: Maverick," Cruise's long-awaited sequel to the eighties blockbuster. It's a film where his signature high-intensity and big-budget production clout converges with his iconoclastic all-American image. You'd think it would be too Tom Cruisey, even for the Cruisiest of Cruise fans, but you'd be wrong. This film is refreshing to watch, captivating from start to finish, and beautifully made. It's a thriller that parts with convention by doing everything right. Its narrative is an update of the formula that made the original so successful: a tale of two men who respect but have issues with each other, and who bond when they defy the laws of physics for the sake of a mission. In this case the mission is even more impossible than anything in the "M.I." films: a quad of F/A 18Es must fly no higher than 100 feet through a snaking canyon at sound barrier-breaking speeds, bomb a uranium enrichment plant, and then perform a devastating vertical maneuver at lung-collapsing g-forces to escape.

Cruise reprises his role as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell. After the shuttering of a secret Mach-tastic mission spearheaded by Rear Admiral Chester Cain (Ed Harris), Maverick is sent to Naval Air Station North Island to train a squadron of Top Gun pilots for their suicide mission. Among them is Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw, played by Miles Teller as the son of Maverick's deceased friend Lieutenant Nick "Goose," who was played by Anthony Edwards in the first movie. Maverick is rueful that Bradshaw was chosen for the mission, and remembers a promise he made to his mother, Carole, a promise the younger man is unaware of, but which yielded an outcome that left him feeling confused and angry at his new instructor. His saltiness creates the compelling sense that despite their insanely difficult military assignment, their real challenge is to see if they can break through the unfortunate wall of animosity that stands between them.

Meanwhile Maverick bumps into Penelope Benjamin, his on-again, off-again girlfriend, played by Jennifer Connelly. Unlike Charlotte Blackwood, who came across as a woodenly contrived character who happened to look and sound like Kelly McGillis, Penelope is dimensional and down-to-earth. The writers wanted a woman who could ground Maverick between his free-spirited days of spinning through space, and wisely let "Penny" do that. Connelly and Cruise have surprisingly good chemistry, and good conversations. She asks him questions we want answered, and he answers them. There's a good scene of them cuddling and talking in Penelope's bedroom, when her daughter, played by Lyliana Wray, comes home from a friend's house early and surprises them. Penelope hastily ushers Maverick out the second-story bedroom window, but to no avail; he lands right in front of young Amelia Benjamin, who sternly warns him not to break her mom's heart -- again. This brief moment affords viewers all the context they need to understand his relationships with both mother and daughter, and a potentially complicated subplot is made easy. 

But the true joy of seeing the film comes from watching the action scenes. Yes, CGI is used, but Cruise is known for going old-school, and here he does it better than I've seen in many years. The actors playing the Top Gun trainees were taught by the crew to film themselves in the cockpits of F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, to give the illusion that they're piloting the planes. Surely it would've been easier to just CGI these scenes, or would it? I'm not sure computer technology can simulate the look of real g-forces pushing people to their blackout point. Apparently Cruise wasn't either, so he opted to film the real thing instead of relying on Unreal Engine effects. The results look and feel amazing.

Just as amazing are the stunts that Cruise himself performs. The scenes with him in the cockpit are convincing, because they really happened. He and the other cast members underwent months of flight training to make this picture, and their every move is true to the realities of piloting fighter jets. But the film succeeds not just in its realism, but in its energy. Cruise is a product of 1980s Hollywood, and it's clear that he learned from his time on the sets of "Risky Business" and "All the Right Moves" that a fast-paced film needs genuine human energy to lift its behemoth production apparatus off the runway. 

"Top Gun: Maverick" has that energy. It has it in the film's opening sequence, where he pushes himself to break a speed record in an experimental aircraft. It has it in a beach volleyball scene, where Maverick shows the Navy his idea of "team-building." And it has it in its imagery. The movie is steeped in American iconography, with T-shirt and blue-jean machismo around every corner, with apple-cheeked women at every bar, and with that old-fashioned feeling that America is still a country that seeds the world with fearless people of all colors and stripes who are willing to take extraordinary risks for their homeland. 

God bless Tom Cruise for still making this stuff.

                                                                                                                                   --- Bill Fontaine