TOP GUN: MAVERICK (12A)
TOM CRUISE AND THE CAST OF TOP GUN: MAVERICK TELL KERRI-ANN ROPER WHY FILMING IN REAL JETS WAS ESSENTIAL TO THE SEQUEL GOING AHEAD
★★★★I REVIEWS BY DAMON SMITH
OPENING with the familiar beats and chimes of Harold Faltermeyer’s electronic score to Tony Scott’s 1986 film and the tub-thumping battle cry of Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone as fighter jets take off from an aircraft carrier, Top Gun: Maverick blasts Tom Cruise back into the box office stratosphere.
More than 30 years after the death of best friend Goose during their secondment to the United States Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor programme aka Top Gun, Captain Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell (Cruise) is comfortably secluded in a hangar in the Mojave Desert, burnishing his reputation as the only fighter pilot to shoot down three enemy planes in the last 40 years.
Admiral Kazansky (Val Kilmer, reprising his role as Iceman), who has been promoted to commander of the US Pacific Fleet, summons Maverick to a mission briefing. A subterranean uranium enrichment plant on enemy soil, guarded by surface-to-air missiles, poses a grave threat to US national security.
Maverick must train the Navy’s brightest young pilots including Goose’s son “Rooster” (Miles Teller) to fly beneath radar and deliver an explosive payload.
“This will be your last post. You fly for Top Gun or you don’t fly for the Navy ever again,” coldly explains Vice Admiral Simpson (Jon Hamm).
As Maverick pushes trainees to the limits of physical and mental endurance, he rekindles romance with bar owner Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connelly) and confronts his guilt over Goose’s death.
“My Dad believed in you,” snarls Rooster. “I’m not going to make the same mistake.”
Top Gun: Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski, is ridiculous crowdpleasing fare of the highest calibre.
Cruise glows in peak physical fitness, matching the bare-chested swagger of younger co-stars, and he catalyses molten screen chemistry with Connelly.
A reliance on physical action sequences rather than digital effects – Cruise is at the controls of almost every flight sequence and co-stars trained extensively in F/A-18 Super Hornets to perform convincingly in cockpits – delivers a pure, unadulterated adrenaline rush of nostalgic pleasure.
It is the kind of escapist fare in which Cruise’s cocksure pilot steals an experimental hypersonic jet and exceeds Mach 10 in violation of orders from Ed Harris’s glowering Rear Admiral.
“Your kind is headed for extinction,” snorts the superior officer. “Maybe so, sir,” retorts Cruise. “But not today!”
In emotional scenes, Cruise wrings out genuine tears but he’s almost upstaged by Kilmer, who breaks hearts with half a dozen tenderly whispered lines.
Jingoistic dialogue tees up the derring-do of a white-knuckle final mission that is admittedly rather protracted. For once, Maverick ignores the need for speed.
WHEN your journey to work involves one of Hollywood’s biggest stars personally flying you back and forth, you could say that’s a good day at the office.
It’s something Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski got to experience.
The American filmmaker, 48, whose credits include Oblivion, Tron: Legacy, Only The Brave and more, got ferried on occasion by the star of his latest project, none other than Tom Cruise.
Arguably one of the most anticipated sequels ever to hit the silver screen, Top Gun: Maverick sees the A-lister reprise his role as hotshot navy pilot Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell, a character made famous in the 1986 film directed by the late Tony Scott.
The sequel brings us a Maverick who finds himself training the latest crop of Top Gun pilots for a dangerous mission, among them the son of his late friend Nick Bradshaw, known to film fans as Goose. Enter Lieutenant Bradley Bradshaw, played by Miles Teller, whose call sign Rooster pays homage to his late father.
“We want it to be an emotional experience,” says Joseph.
“It’s a character-driven story, and Maverick is in a very different place at the end of this film than you find him at the beginning, which was the journey we wanted.
“Casting is so important on a film like this, and I’m really pleased with our cast, and so proud of them for what they managed to accomplish, and their camaraderie.
“And when you see them do what they do on screen, I think it is really, really special.”
He’s referring of course to a starstudded cast that includes Mad Men’s Jon Hamm, Ed Harris, Charles Parnell, Jennifer Connelly and returning Top Gun favourite Val Kilmer in his role as Maverick’s old nemesis-turned-friend, Iceman.
For the sequel, the cast underwent months of intensive flight training, meaning the footage you see of them in F/A-18 aircrafts is indeed real and not CGI.
“I never got in an F-18,” says Joseph when asked if he did any fancy flying.
“The closest I came was Tom (Cruise) would fly me back and forth to work sometimes,” he says.
For Tom, the key to making the sequel was in the filming – and flying – practicalities.
He says: “I’d thought about a sequel to Top Gun for all these years. People had asked for a sequel for decades. Decades. And the thing I said to the studio from the beginning was: ‘If I’m ever going to entertain this, we’re shooting everything practically.
“I’m in that F/A-18, period. So, we’re going to have to develop camera rigs.
“There’s going to be wind tunnels and engineering. It’s going to take a long, long time for me to figure it out.’ And I wanted to work with Jerry (Bruckheimer, one of the movie’s producers). I wouldn’t do this movie without him in a million years.
“For years, people had said, ‘Can’t you shoot (the movie) with CGI?’ And I always said, ‘No. That’s not the experience.’
“I said, ‘I need to find the right story. And we’re going to need the right team.
“This movie is like trying to hit a bullet with a bullet. I’m not playing.”’
It was an “incredible experience” coming back to the character, the 59-year-old star of films like Mission: Impossible, Vanilla Sky, Jerry Maguire and more says.
“Maverick is still Maverick. He still wants to fly Mach 2 with his hair on fire. But you see the transition that Maverick undergoes.
“The pressure of him losing his best friend, the responsibility he feels about that and how he has carried that with him – and how that incident has changed both his and Rooster’s lives forever”, Tom says.
“Maverick loves Rooster as a son. This film is about family and it’s about friendship and it’s about sacrifice. It’s about redemption and the cost of mistakes.”
For American actor Miles, 35, whose big-screen roster includes Fantastic Four, War Dogs and Whiplash, filming the adrenalin-fuelled flying scenes was “intense”.
He says: “We trained for this for a long time, Tom had us in a flight programme for several months before we ever started filming.
“But it was never something you really ever got, like, super comfortable with, at least for me. It was something that every time I went up, it really tested me and I felt like I wanted to puke pretty much every time .... ”
Miles’s upcoming projects include starring in the new Paramount+ series The Offer, which charts Al Ruddy’s journey to making the now iconic film, The Godfather.
He says of working with Tom: “I just learned that there’s always something else to be done, that it’s really never finished until the movie is coming out. His attention to detail is something that’s unparalleled.
“And this career that he has in these movies, they don’t happen by accident.
“It comes from an immense amount of work and effort and also love. I mean, Tom loves making movies, he really loves entertaining audiences and it shows.”
For Joseph, the timing is also right for the movie’s release, after several delays due to the coronavirus pandemic.
He explains: “I was a little concerned, waiting for two years, wondering... would the film feel stale, but it’s the opposite.
“It somehow feels more relevant post-pandemic because of the kind of movie we made and what we want to do.
“I’m just excited that theatres are opening up and people are going back to the movies. And I hope they appreciate how we made this film and what we did here.”
Given the rave reviews from critics so far, it’s clear audiences haven’t lost that loving feeling when it comes to Maverick.
Top Gun: Maverick is in UK cinemas now
I felt like I wanted to puke pretty much every time
Miles Teller on riding in an F18