The real secret of Top Gun: Maverick
Tom Cruise-led movie sequel is made for spectacle and sensation rather than subtlety, Ann Hornaday writes.
Top Gun: Maverick has been described as many things in its mostly rave reviews: Thrilling. Slick. Visceral.
The iconic 1986 Top Gun played like a parody of Reagan-era macho posturing. What makes Maverick such a bracing gust of cinematic pleasure is the fact that this time, all the shiny hardware, fist-bumping action, whooshing sound effects and bros-forever emotional beats are kept afloat so effortlessly.
Effortlessness — the art of appearing nonchalant even when you're working your hardest — might have been the cardinal virtue of cinema's Golden Age, when stars such as Cary Grant, Grace Kelly and Sidney Poitier personified its most elegant, unselfconscious values. But the term can apply just as aptly to movies themselves — when “motion” and “picture” converge on a sublime plane all their own, with sound, image, actor and emotion fusing to create an experience so organic that it feels as if it arrived on screen fully formed. A movie is effortless when it just feels right — or, conversely, feels just right.
Like the original, Maverick is a big, boisterous summer blockbuster, made for spectacle and sensation rather than subtlety. But it achieves all those aims with offhanded confidence that's as disarming as it is startling, arriving at a time when showing your work has become a badge of honour, on screen and elsewhere. The breezily modest self-assurance of Top Gun: Maverick feels like a balm — and, of course, its easygoing mix of action, drama and lighthearted humour can be traced to one man: its producer and star, Tom Cruise.
Cruise seemed born for the camera when he became a star in 1983's Risky Business. He became massive in the first Top Gun, his sharp-eyed gaze and signature grin becoming part of what looked like a billion-dollar brand. Still, underneath the cocky arrogance of his character, the viewer could detect a young actor working hard at seeming not to be working at all. It was in his successive roles — The Color of Money, Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July — that Cruise's single-minded ethic of drive and focus came into their own in toes-up, thoroughly inhabited performances.
He displayed just as much commitment when he subverted his own screen-idol persona by delivering astonishing turns in Magnolia and Tropic Thunder. Whether in comedies or dramas, action adventures or sci-fi fantasies, Cruise has mastered and keeps refining the art of appearing thoroughly relaxed and in command. This is why his Mission: Impossible franchise — the latest trailer of which can be seen before Top Gun: Maverick — became so much more reliably entertaining than the dour, adamantly un-playful Bond movies featuring Daniel Craig.
Of course, Cruise himself is anything but offhanded: Just watching him tirelessly work rope lines, press scrums and royal pomp during the global marketing push for Top Gun: Maverick makes that clear, as does his well-publicized insistence on doing his own stunts, even as he approaches his 60s. If Cruise's obsessive focus, practised professionalism and calculated image seem at odds with the unforced ease of his work on screen, that should come as no surprise: He's a natural. So is his movie. Which makes it feel ... just right.