Top Gun: Maverick

 

Tom Cruise was 24 when Top Gun was released in 1986, a time when he was only just beginning to become one of Hollywood's more bankable faces.

In director Joseph Kosinski's sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise, a robust 60, is still the incorrigible navy fighter pilot of the earlier film but now he's grown wiser, and though his sculpted face shows no signs of worry, the ace is burdened by regret.

Both movies feature thrilling jet plane aerial sequences but it's the new picture's emotional complications that lift it above the original, directed by Tony Scott. These complications extend from the troubling events of the earlier film (revisited in flashback) and presumably from other incidents involving bar owner Penny (Jennifer Connelly) that transpired in the interim.

The earlier movie invested a lot in Cruise's considerable charm, Kelly McGillis' gender-role-busting aviation-consultant-in-heels, and the smoldering swagger of Cruise's leading co-stars -- Anthony Edwards as his co-pilot Goose, and, of course, Val Kilmer as Maverick's cocky competition for team leader, Iceman. (Kilmer, who has been rendered voiceless by cancer, makes a cameo appearance in the new picture.)

Top Gun was crafted around a fairly conventional "failure and redemption" storyline, but had a rocking Top 40 soundtrack (Take My Breath Away won the Best Song Oscar in '87.) The picture was an enormous hit for Paramount.

To the new filmmakers' credit, Maverick's layered narrative enhances the movie's familiar tale of a ragtag team of talented incompatibles brought together by an unlikely and reluctant agent (Cruise). The pilots -- all young and fashion model pretty (that hasn't changed) -- are dispatched on an impossible mission (pun intended) against a nuclear facility being readied by an unnamed enemy (don't want to hurt the film's foreign markets).

As a nice touch, Maverick's relationship with the young pilot Rooster (Miles Teller), the orphaned son of Maverick's late friend Goose, is revealed gradually, as the two square off early but are forced by circumstances to set aside their lingering pain and resentment for the sake of the mission.

Top Gun: Maverick is successful because nothing -- except the aerial maneuvering -- feels overplayed. Even Cruise, a showboater from his youth, is pretty restrained in a picture that is being released into a different public space than what existed during the Reagan '80s.