Top Gun: Maverick

Tom Cruise’s pas­sion for run­ning in film is noto­ri­ous­ly insa­tiable. Scyth­ing the air with his arms and slam­ming tar­mac with his soles has been his pre­ferred exer­cise rou­tine for decades. That unerr­ing, shark-like for­ward momen­tum has grad­u­al­ly evolved, mov­ing off the ground, to ankle-break­ing aer­i­al leaps and heli­copter manoeu­vring hero­ics. But now, after spend­ing so much time hurtling for­wards, Cruise is mov­ing faster than ever before – to start look­ing back.

Thir­ty-five years since we left Mav­er­ick, the cocky, Right­eous Broth­ers-singing, tro­phy-chas­ing test pilot, we find that he’s not total­ly out­grown his high-fly­ing youth; in fact, he lives in an air­craft hangar. In a thrilling and sur­pris­ing­ly ethe­re­al open­ing, Mav­er­ick push­es a test plane to 10 times the speed of sound, despite the objec­tions of Ed Har­ris’ Admi­ral Cain.

Told that ​“the future is com­ing” and he’s ​“not in it,” Mav­er­ick is sub­se­quent­ly ground­ed and sent to teach a new group of pilots the ropes and pre­pare them for an intri­cate bomb­ing mis­sion. Unlike the vague back­bone of com­pe­ti­tion that the orig­i­nal film was built around, this mis­sion is all about work­ing togeth­er (albeit unques­tion­ing­ly, against a vague enemy).

The jostling between past and future is where the film is at its most inter­est­ing, and where it spins out. Along­side Har­ris’ glar­ing com­mand­ing offi­cer, Glen Powell’s inclu­sion as a cav­a­lier hot­shot sees two actors who have both played the test pilot and Mer­cury Sev­en astro­naut John Glenn (Har­ris in The Right Stuff; Pow­ell in Hid­den Fig­ures) trap Mav­er­ick between his over­con­fi­dent youth and a more reg­i­ment­ed future.

A brief appear­ance from Val Kilmer’s Ice­man is touch­ing, forc­ing two char­ac­ters defined by action to pause and, thought­ful­ly nav­i­gat­ing Kilmer’s strug­gles with throat can­cer, use words. It’s a sweet and low-key moment in a film that’s any­thing but, although it’s frus­trat­ing that Iceman’s sto­ry ulti­mate­ly serves as a strange, sac­cha­rine meta-memo­r­i­al for an actor who is very much alive.

Back in school, Maverick’s teach­ing ini­tial­ly offers a refresh­ing­ly uni­fied, col­le­giate approach to fly­ing, fore­go­ing the excep­tion­al­ist pol­i­tics of the orig­i­nal; but this is a Tom Cruise film, so he must be the hero. The film’s best sequence sees Mav­er­ick prove that his student’s seem­ing­ly impos­si­ble mis­sion is no such thing. Joseph Kosinski’s direc­tion straps us in the cock­pit; instead of let­ting planes fly by to show how fast they are, we’re in one, feel­ing the accel­er­a­tion via squared off close-ups of wob­bling cheeks and pet­ri­fy­ing­ly close ter­ra fir­ma.

On a big, loud screen it’ll have your palms slip­ping off the arm rests, but this is also an exam­ple of the film’s unbal­anced trade-off between the gen­er­a­tions. We’re intro­duced to a new breed of pilots: they can work togeth­er, they’re not all men, and they’re not all white; but by the end of the film, it’s the sea­soned pro, using a plane from the good old days, that’s going to save the day.

Top Gun: Mav­er­ick is an extreme­ly enjoy­able thrill ride, yet its focus on intense, immer­sive action doesn’t allow much room for lighter, steami­er fun like its pre­de­ces­sor. Polit­i­cal­ly, the series may have evolved beyond the brazen mil­i­tary recruit­ment of the orig­i­nal, but the son­ic boomers still come out on top.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, month­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.