TOP GUN: MAVERICK (12A)
★★★★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.