Cruise the ‘old man’ showing aviators how to fly

It couldn’t outmaneuver the pandemic enemy that delayed its release for two years, but “Top Gun: Maverick” can’t lose, really.

It’s a pretty good time, and often a pretty good movie for the nervous blur we’re in right now. It’s cozy. And it’ll be catnip for those eager to watch Tom Cruise flash That Look. “It’s the only one I’ve got,” he says, twice, to on-screen cohorts.

What is That Look? It’s the half-smile of insubordination when a superior officer (Ed Harris or Jon Hamm this time) busts test pilot and congenital speedneeder Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell’s chops, ineffectively.

It’s The Look that goes with an eternally boyish voice and demeanor. It’s those sidelong hesitation glances, right next door to early-career Warren Beatty’s. And it’s the only look that could possibly correlate to lines barked in Maverick’s direction from the 1986 “Top Gun,” the worst/ best being: “Son, your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash.”

Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. wrote the first one, ripping off every aviation picture they could pop into their VCRs. Half of “Top Gun: Maverick” is a callback to the ’86 original, which was not my kind of summer blockbuster, but it’s a free country.

The other half of director Joseph Kosinski’s 36-years-later sequel goes in other, reluctantly progressive directions, in a mellower blockbuster key. Now, I want to be clear here. The script of “Top Gun: Maverick” does a surprising amount to keep the movie airborne, even as its dialogue in between bang-up aerial sequences is just as corny and flavorless as the original’s. (The “Maverick” screenwriters are Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie.) The results effectively shore up and polish the monument to Tom Cruise that is Tom Cruise. And the sequel’s star-preservation directive writes checks the public will almost certainly cash.

The old “Top Gun” opened with a screenful of words about “the lost art of aerial combat,” and the U.S. Navy’s elite Fighter Weapons School at the Naval Air Station Miramar in San Diego. “Maverick” opens with the same phrase, only the art of aerial combat is really lost now, in the age of drone warfare.

Capt. Mitchell, who lives alone in the desert with his beloved Kawasaki motorcycle, is called to a new and time-sensitive duty by his old cohort Iceman (Val Kilmer — more on him later), now a U.S. Pacific Fleet commander. Maverick has three weeks to train a group of new Top Gun aces to destroy a uranium enrichment plant in an unspecified but assuredly Slavic location. One of the trainees is Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the grudgeladen son of Maverick’s late radar intercept officer, Goose, played by Anthony Edwards back when.

And that’s it. Quite simple. Jennifer Connelly takes the new role of barkeeper Penny, an old flame of Maverick’s, now a single mother. It’s nice to see Cruise and Connelly share scenes relying wholly on how they look against desert vistas or in Tony Scott-style telephoto close-up. At one point, after the most discreet sex scene in screen history, they share some pillow talk we see but don’t hear, and you find yourself imagining what the actors are actually saying. ”So, what were you doing when I was filming ‘All the Right Moves’?”

A lot of “Top Gun: Maverick” works that way; it’s a time machine, an ’80s karaoke act, and a familiar fable of making amends and restoring your confidence through eliminating the enemy. I lost track of how many insults Maverick endures from the young folk. Pops. Relic. Old Man. Fossil. Cruise may look a week and a half older than he did in ’86, but this movie has all the intergenerational friction it can get.

How are the other new Top Gunners? All well played, all dully written. There’s Hangman (Glen Powell), the swaggering Iceman equivalent, giddy with self-regard. And there’s a woman! Monica Barbaro’s Phoenix doesn’t have much to do besides pushups and steely resolve in reaction shot mode, but she’s an asset. There is, however, a side effect that comes from the addition of some Black and minority performers here. Once too often they’re just another awestruck rooting section for Maverick’s heroics. Your enjoyment of “Top Gun: Maverick” depends on other things besides dimensional characters. The first one didn’t have them or need them. Why should this one?

The flying scenes, to my untrained eye, are far more impressive and enveloping (and better edited, by a mile) than the ’86’s. This is where director Kosinski and his collaborators have made the clearest jump up from the first movie. Some of the surface techniques are deployed on

the groundwork, too. I haven’t seen so many slow dissolves from one shot to

another in years, and they have a way of intensifying Maverick’s isolation when he’s down, martyred, humbled, just before Cruise is up, up and away again. “The fastest man alive,” one admiring Naval officer coos in an early sequence, when Maverick breaks the Mach 10 barrier just because.

Homoerotic team building? Glad you asked: Instead of gleaming shirtless beach volleyball, we have sunset shirtless beach football, only this time, after a while, Maverick sits on the sidelines, watching his charges with a wistful smile. The key line in “Top Gun: Maverick” is “Don’t think up there. Just do. You think up there, you’re dead.” Maverick repeats that axiom to the surly Rooster, whom Teller makes more interesting than written.

Speaking of which:

The scene that truly cuts through all the shiny, entertaining fraudulence brings together Cruise and Kilmer’s Adm. Kazansky. It’s a meeting of two sorts of actors, and two sorts of movie stars. Kilmer’s wellknown health challenges make the particulars of Iceman’s cancerous condition all the more affecting.

Their big scene could’ve stunk up the joint with phony feeling, but somehow it doesn’t work out that way. As Maverick and Iceman revisit their old days and warily eye the future that may not belong to them, the cardboard almost imperceptibly turns to flesh, and the movie becomes more than a lesson in crafty sequel-making. The interplay between Cruise, whose fame, like so many huge stars, outstripped his versatility and ability to surprise, and Kilmer, whose success never matched his talent, plays out in a dimensional way. Even the musical score backs off and lets them act.

The best of the movie takes its cue from this scene. The victory, in the end, is a foregone conclusion, but it’s silly-rousing enough to satisfy younger and older audiences alike. It may help to have hated the original, but I liked this one. Thirty-six years from now, we’ll probably be watching Cruise teaching a new cadre of flying aces. Only the planet will have changed.

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for sequences of intense action and some strong language) Running time: 2:17

How to watch: In theaters

PARAMOUNT PICTURES Tom Cruise as Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in “Top Gun: Maverick.”