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In “Top Gun: Maverick,” the breathless, gravity and logic-defying “ Top Gun ” sequel that somehow makes all the sense in the world despite landing more than three decades after the late Tony Scott ’s original, an admiral refers to Tom Cruise ’s navy aviator Pete Mitchell—call sign “ Maverick ”—as “the fastest man alive.” It’s a chuckle-inducing scene that recalls one in “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” when Alec Baldwin ’s high-ranking Alan Hunley deems Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, “the living manifestation of destiny.” In neither of these instances are Cruise’s co-stars exclusively referring to his make-believe screen personas. They are also (or rather, primarily) talking about the ongoing legacy of Cruise the actor himself. 

Truth be told, our fearless and ever-handsome action hero earns both appraisals with a generous side of applause, being one of the precious remnants of bona-fide movie superstardoms of yore, a slowly dwindling they-don’t-make-'em-like-they-used-to notion of immortality these days. Indeed, Cruise’s consistent commitment to Hollywood showmanship—along with the insane levels of physical craft he unfailingly puts on the table by insisting to do his own stunts—I would argue, deserves the same level of high-brow respect usually reserved for the fully-method sorts such as Daniel Day-Lewis . Even if you somehow overlook the fact that Cruise is one of our most gifted and versatile dramatic and comedic actors with the likes of “ Born on the Fourth of July ,” “ Magnolia ,” “ Tropic Thunder ,” and “ Collateral ” under his belt, you will never forget why you show up to a Tom Cruise movie, thanks in large part to his aforesaid enduring dedication. How many other household names and faces can claim to guarantee “a singular movie event” these days and deliver each time, without exceptions?

In that regard, you will be right at home with “Top Gun: Maverick,” director Joseph Kosinski ’s witty adrenaline booster that allows its leading producer to be exactly what he is—a star—while upping the emotional and dramatic stakes of its predecessor with a healthy (but not overdone) dose of nostalgia. After a title card that explains what “Top Gun” is—the identical one that introduced us to the world of crème-de-la-crème Navy pilots in 1986—we find Maverick in a role on the fringes of the US Navy, working as an undaunted test pilot against the familiar backdrop of Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone.” You won’t be surprised that soon enough, he gets called on a one-last-job type of mission as a teacher to a group of recent Top Gun graduates. Their assignment is just as obscure and politically cuckoo as it was in the first movie. There is an unnamed enemy—let’s called it Russia because it’s probably Russia—some targets that need to be destroyed, a flight plan that sounds nuts, and a scheme that will require all successful Top Gun recruits to fly at dangerously low altitudes. But can it be done?

It’s a long shot, if the details of the operation—explained to the aviator hopefuls in a rather “It can’t be done” style reminiscent of “ Mission: Impossible ”—are any indication. But you will be surprised that more appealing than the prospect of the bonkers mission here is the human drama that co-scribes Ehren Kruger , Eric Warren Singer , and Christopher McQuarrie spin from a story by Peter Craig and Justin Marks . For starters, the group of potential recruits include Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw ( Miles Teller , terrific), the son of the dearly departed “Goose,” whose accidental death still haunts Maverick as much as it does the rest of us. And if Rooster’s understandable distaste of him wasn’t enough (despite Maverick’s protective instincts towards him), there are skeptics of Maverick’s credentials— Jon Hamm ’s Cyclone, for instance, can’t understand why Maverick’s foe-turned-friend Iceman ( Val Kilmer , returning with a tearjerker of a part) insists on him as the teacher of the mission. Further complicating the matters is Maverick’s on-and-off romance with Penny Benjamin (a bewitching Jennifer Connelly ), a new character that was prominently name-checked in the original movie, as some will recall. What an entanglement through which one is tasked to defend their nation and celebrate a certain brand of American pride ...

In a different package, all the brouhaha jingoism and proud fist-shaking seen in “Top Gun: Maverick” could have been borderline insufferable. But fortunately Kosinski—whose underseen and underrated “Only The Brave” will hopefully find a second life now—seems to understand exactly what kind of movie he is asked to navigate. In his hands, the tone of “Maverick” strikes a fine balance between good-humored vanity and half-serious self-deprecation, complete with plenty of quotable zingers and emotional moments that catch one off-guard.

In some sense, what this movie takes most seriously are concepts like friendship, loyalty, romance, and okay, bromance. Everything else that surrounds those notions—like patriotic egotism—feels like playful winks and embellishments towards fashioning an old-school action movie. And because this mode is clearly shared by the entirety of the cast—from a memorable Ed Harris that begs for more screen time to the always great Glen Powell as the alluringly overconfident “ Hangman ,” Greg Tarzan Davis as “Coyote,” Jay Ellis as “ Payback ,” Danny Ramirez as “Fanboy,” Monica Barbaro as “ Phoenix ,” and Lewis Pullman as “Bob”—“Top Gun: Maverick” runs fully on its enthralling on-screen harmony at times. For evidence, look no further than the intense, fiery chemistry between Connelly and Cruise throughout—it’s genuinely sexy stuff—and (in a nostalgic nod to the original), a rather sensual beach football sequence, shot with crimson hues and suggestive shadows by Claudio Miranda . 

Still, the action sequences—all the low-altitude flights, airborne dogfights as well as Cruise on a motorcycle donned in his original Top Gun leather jacket—are likewise the breathtaking stars of “Maverick,” often accompanied by Harold Faltermeyer ’s celebratory original score (aided by cues from Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe ). Reportedly, all the flying scenes—a pair of which are pure hell-yes moments for Cruise—were shot in actual U.S. Navy F/A-18s, for which the cast had to be trained for during a mind-boggling process. The authentic work that went into every frame generously shows. As the jets cut through the atmosphere and brush their target soils in close-shave movements—all coherently edited by Eddie Hamilton —the sensation they generate feels miraculous and worthy of the biggest screen one can possibly find. Equally worthy of that big screen is the emotional strokes of “Maverick” that pack an unexpected punch. Sure, you might be prepared for a second sky-dance with “Maverick,” but perhaps not one that might require a tissue or two in its final stretch.

Available in theaters May 27th. 

Tomris Laffly

Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes to  RogerEbert.com , Variety and Time Out New York, with bylines in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Journal International, Vulture, The Playlist and The Wrap, among other outlets.

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Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action, and some strong language.

131 minutes

Tom Cruise as Captain Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell

Miles Teller as Lt. Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw

Jennifer Connelly as Penny Benjamin

Jon Hamm as Vice Admiral Cyclone

Glen Powell as Hangman

Lewis Pullman as Bob

Charles Parnell as Warlock

Bashir Salahuddin as Coleman

Monica Barbaro as Phoenix

Jay Ellis as Payback

Danny Ramirez as Fanboy

Greg Tarzan Davis as Coyote

Ed Harris as Rear Admiral

Val Kilmer as Admiral Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky

Manny Jacinto as Fritz

• Joseph Kosinski

Writer (based on characters created by)

• Jack Epps Jr.

Writer (story by)

• Peter Craig
• Justin Marks
• Ehren Kruger
• Eric Warren Singer
• Christopher McQuarrie

Cinematographer

• Claudio Miranda
• Chris Lebenzon
• Eddie Hamilton
• Lorne Balfe
• Harold Faltermeyer
• Hans Zimmer

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Top Gun: Maverick First Reviews: The Most Thrilling Blockbuster We've Gotten in Years

Critics say the long-awaited sequel is a must-see on the big screen and not only potentially better than the original, but also one of the best tom cruise movies ever..

TAGGED AS: Action , blockbusters , Film , films , movie , movies

Tom Cruise returns to the cockpit in Top Gun: Maverick , the long-awaited follow-up to the 1986 blockbuster Top Gun . And if you’re not already feeling the need for speed — again — then you might want to reconsider, because the first reviews for this legacy sequel are clear of the danger zone. In fact, many are even calling it a better movie than the original, and maybe even one of the best Tom Cruise movies of all time.

Here’s what critics are saying about Top Gun: Maverick :

Will Top Gun fans be happy?

On the whole, this is a thrilling sequel which is bound to delight fans of the first film. – Linda Marric, The Jewish Chronicle

It’s a follow-up that will thrill every Top Gun fan. – Philip De Semlyen, Time Out

Mainstream audiences will be happily airborne, especially the countless dads who loved Top Gun and will eagerly want to share this fresh shot of adrenaline with their sons. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

This follow-up, directed by Joseph Kosinski, deals in the same unexpected-itch-scratching bliss: it’s crammed with images you didn’t know you were desperate to see until the second you see them. – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

In the opening moments… you don’t know if you’re watching the original 1986 Top Gun or a new one. – Brian Truitt, USA Today

Tony Scott’s admirers may miss that disreputable edge, the unrepentantly vulgar sensibility that made the original Top Gun a dreamy, voluptuous hoot. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

(Photo by Scott Garfield/©Paramount Pictures)

How does it compare to the original?

Top Gun: Maverick improves on the original. It’s deeper, it’s not corny, and it has thrilling effects. – Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

The dogfights, chases, and mid-air sequences are truly remarkable — far clearer and far more intense than anything in the original Top Gun . – Matt Singer, ScreenCrush

A superior sequel. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

If Top Gun was a fun film because it invented Tom Cruise, Maverick is a great film because it immortalizes him. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Maverick ideally would be less formulaic – and for the record, it doesn’t quite match the magic of the OG Top Gun . – Brian Truitt, USA Today

Is it a worthy legacy sequel?

Few Hollywood reboots can boast this blend of nostalgia, freshness and adrenaline. You will want to high five someone on the way out. – Philip De Semlyen, Time Out

The film is a true legacy sequel. In the tradition of Star Wars: The Force Awakens , it’s a carefully reconstructed clone of its predecessor, tooled not only to reflect changing tastes and attitudes but the ascendancy of its star Tom Cruise to a level of fame that borders on the mythological. – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

The sequel follows the original beat for beat, to a degree that’s almost comical. And yet, as formulaic as it is, there’s no denying that it delivers in terms of both nostalgia and reinvention. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Tom Cruise remains deeply ambivalent with the notion of passing the torch to a new generation onscreen and so Top Gun: Maverick remains focused on Maverick and his story, sometimes to the detriment of the young cast. – Matt Singer, ScreenCrush

(Photo by ©Paramount Pictures)

Is this one of the best blockbusters we’ve gotten in recent years?

Top Gun: Maverick is as thrilling as blockbusters get. – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

Top Gun: Maverick is the most fun I’ve had watching a big dumb Hollywood blockbuster for a while. – Linda Marric, The Jewish Chronicle

Takes to the skies as no blockbuster has before. – Peter Debruge, Variety

The movie soars – a reminder of how good Hollywood can be at popcorn entertainment when it sets its mind to it (and Cruise is involved). – Philip De Semlyen, Time Out

It is unquestionably the best studio action film to have been released since 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road . – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

How does it rank against other Tom Cruise movies?

We have surely arrived at the Cruisiest film he’s yet made. – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

It’s not a Tom Cruise movie so much as it’s “ Tom Cruise: The Movie .” – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

In terms of performance, this is one of Cruise’s best pictures. – Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

It fully surrenders to the grandiose fun that’s marked the best of Cruise’s recent star vehicles. – Jake Cole, Slant Magazine

Cruise finds new ways to add depth to his signature character (sorry, Ethan Hunt) without sacrificing any of his essential qualities. – Brian Truitt, USA Today

How is Val Kilmer’s return as Iceman?

Kilmer’s brief cameo, in what has the feel of a swan song, carries far more weight than anything directly related to the story. – Jake Cole, Slant Magazine

The film’s most moving element comes during the brief screen time of Kilmer’s Iceman. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

If there’s one scene that really takes your breath away, it’s his. – Brian Truitt, USA Today

In one fictional moment, he gives us something unmistakably, irreducibly real, partly by puncturing the fantasy of human invincibility that his co-star has never stopped trying to sell. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

Are there any other standouts in the cast?

Miles Teller [gives] an oddly alluring performance that really shouldn’t work as well as it does. – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

Teller, with his best turn since Whiplash, factors in as a worthy emotional foil. – Brian Truitt, USA Today

Jennifer Connelly brings a lot to a thankless role. – Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

Does Top Gun: Maverick deliver as an action movie?

It [has] what is surely one of the most impressive plane-based action scenes ever committed to film. – Matt Singer, ScreenCrush

The real draw here is, of course, the action, and Kosinski asserts his gift for large-scale filmmaking across the film’s runtime. – Jake Cole, Slant Magazine

The commitment to filming practically-everything practically feels like the cutting-edge equivalent of Howard Hughes’ history-making Hell’s Angels . – Peter Debruge, Variety

You have a series of character-driven, heart-in-your-throat dogfights more vivid than anything in the first previous film. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Breathtakingly balletic, and grounded in the increasingly rare pleasure of the tangible… it’s a true feat for director Joseph Kosinski to make something this ambitious look this effortless. – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

The action scenes [have] a breathtaking beauty and urgency: the play of light and gravity on the actors’ faces, and the way the landscapes spin and drop away balletically through the canopy glass, puts other blockbusters’ green-screened swooping to shame. – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

The best thing this movie does is boost visceral analog action over the usual numbing bombardment of CG fakery. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Are there any major criticisms?

One would have appreciated a slightly more effective female-centric subplot. – Linda Marric, The Jewish Chronicle

The film, unfortunately, doesn’t extend as much of a loving hand toward the women of Top Gun . – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

Women are few and far between, and even the more prominent ones get mostly perfunctory treatment. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

It would’ve been nice to see Meg Ryan return as the widow/mom, but the rules are cruel when it comes to aging female actors. – Peter Debruge, Variety

Do we need to see this on the big screen?

This is definitely a film that benefits from the IMAX experience, and the big-ass soundscape that comes with it. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

This movie needs the big screen, preferably as big as you can find. I saw it in an IMAX theater, and now I have some idea of what it would feel like to take off in a fighter pilot from an aircraft carrier. – Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

The result is the most immersive flight simulator audiences will have ever experienced, right down to the great Dolby roar of engines vibrating through their seats. – Peter Debruge, Variety

It’s the kind of edge-of-your-seat, fist-pumping spectacular that can unite an entire room full of strangers sitting in the dark and leave them with a wistful tear in their eye. – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

Will it leave us wanting more?

One can imagine future spinoffs involving any of these characters. – Peter Debruge, Variety

[It’s a] launching pad for a potential second or even third sequel with its young cast at the center of new adventures. – Linda Marric, The Jewish Chronicle

Top Gun: Maverick opens in theaters on May 27, 2022.

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‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Review: Will This Stuff Still Fly?

Tom Cruise takes to the air once more in a long-awaited sequel to a much-loved ’80s action blockbuster.

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By A.O. Scott

Every so often in “Top Gun: Maverick,” Pete Mitchell (that’s Maverick) is summoned to a face-to-face with an admiral. Pete, after all these years in the Navy — more than 35, but who’s counting — has stalled at the rank of captain. He’s one of the best fighter pilots ever to take wing, but the U.S. military hierarchy can be a treacherous political business, and Maverick is anything but a politician. In the presence of a superior officer he is apt to salute, smirk and push his career into the middle of the table like a stack of poker chips. He’s all in. Always.

The first such meeting is with Rear Adm. Chester Cain, a weathered chunk of brass played by Ed Harris, who has an impressive in-movie flight record of his own. (Without “The Right Stuff,” there would have been no “Top Gun.”) He seems to be telling Pete that the game is over. Thanks to new technology, flyboys like him are all but obsolete.

Based on this scene, you might think that the movie is setting out to be a meditation on American air power in the age of drone warfare, but that will have to wait for the next sequel. Pete still has a job to do. A teaching job, officially, but we’ll get to that. The conversation with Cain is not so much a red herring as a meta-commentary. Pete, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, is the avatar of Tom Cruise, and the central question posed by this movie has less to do with the necessity of combat pilots than with the relevance of movie stars. With all this cool new technology at hand — you can binge 37 episodes of Silicon Valley grifting without leaving your couch — do we really need guys, or movies, like this?

“Top Gun: Maverick,” directed by Joseph Kosinski ( “Tron: Legacy” ), answers in the affirmative with a confident, aggressive swagger that might look like overcompensation. Not that there is a hint of insecurity in Cruise’s performance — or in Maverick’s. On the brink of 60, he still projects the nimble, cocky, perennially boyish charm that conquered the box office in the 1980s.

Back then — in Tony Scott’s “Top Gun” — Pete was a brash upstart striving to stand out amid the camaraderie and competition of the super-elite Top Gun program. He seduced the instructor Charlie (Kelly McGillis), locked horns with his golden-boy nemesis, Iceman (Val Kilmer), and lost his best friend and radar intercept officer, Goose (Anthony Edwards). Ronald Reagan was president and the Cold War was in its florid final throes, but “Top Gun” wasn’t really a combat picture. It was, at heart, a sports movie decked out in battle gear, about a bunch of guys showboating, trash talking and trying to outdo one another.

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Review: Tom Cruise flies high — again — in the exhilarating ‘Top Gun: Maverick’

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“If you think, you’re dead.” That’s one of Tom Cruise’s more memorable lines from “Top Gun,” a cautionary reminder that when your engine flames out or an enemy pilot locks you in their sights, hesitation means death. Inadvertently, the line also suggests the best way to enjoy Tony Scott’s immortal 1986 blockbuster: Best not to think too long or hard about the dumb plot, the threadbare romance, the fetishization of U.S. military might or the de rigueur plausibility issues. The key is to succumb, like Cruise’s high-flying Maverick himself, to a world of unchecked instinct and pure sensation, to savor the movie’s symphony of screaming jets and booming Giorgio Moroder, not to mention all those lovingly photographed torsos and tighty-whities.

Jets still scream and muscles still gleam in the ridiculous and often ridiculously entertaining “Top Gun: Maverick,” though in several respects, the movie evinces — and rewards — an unusual investment of brainpower. I’d go further and say that it offers its own decisive reversal of Maverick’s dubious logic: It has plenty on its mind, and it’s gloriously alive.

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The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials .

A lot of consideration and calculation have clearly gone into this long-aborning blockbuster sequel, insofar as Cruise (one of the producers) and his collaborators have taken such clear pains to maintain continuity with the events, if not the style, of the first film. That’s no small thing, more than 30 years after the fiery young Maverick lost Goose, made peace with Iceman and rode off into the annals of fictional U.S. Navy history. And rather than let bygones be bygones, the director Joseph Kosinski and a trio of screenwriters (Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Cruise’s favorite auteur-wingman, Christopher McQuarrie) have resurrected those threads of rivalry, tragedy and triumph and spun them into uncharted realms of male-weepie grandiosity.

Some of this continuity is a matter of basic story sense, rooted in a shrewd understanding of franchise mechanics and an equally savvy appeal to ’80s nostalgia. But it also has something to do with the 59-year-old Cruise’s close stewardship of his own superhuman image, a commitment that speaks to his talent as well as his monomania. And with the arguable exception of “Mission: Impossible’s” Ethan Hunt, few Cruise characters have felt as aligned with that monomania as Maverick. From the moment he entered the frame in ’86, sporting flippant aviator shades and riding a Kawasaki motorcycle, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell announced himself as a signature Cruise creation — a precision-tooled amalgam of underwear-dancing sex symbol (just three years after “Risky Business”) and the envelope-pushing, heights-scaling action star he would become.

These days, the need for speed still persists for both Cruise and Maverick, even if the latter does more flying than running. But for all the barriers he’s broken and all the miles he’s logged in his career as a Navy test pilot, Maverick occupies a state of self-willed professional stasis. Unwilling to be promoted into desk-job irrelevancy, he is a captain by rank and a rebel by nature. The opening sequence finds him playing Icarus with one of the Navy’s shiny new toys, thumbing his nose in the process at the first of the movie’s two glowering authoritarians. (They’re played by Ed Harris and Jon Hamm.) Old habits die hard, but so do the ghosts of the past, and Maverick, for all his reckless abandon in the cockpit, will soon find himself breaking his own rules by thinking more carefully, and tactically, than he’s ever had to do before.

Called back to the elite Navy training school where he flew planes, defied orders and irritated his peers with distinction, Maverick is charged with preparing the program’s best and brightest for a stealth attack on a far-flung uranium enrichment plant owned by some conveniently unidentified NATO-threatening entity. As impossible missions go, it makes the Death Star trench attack look like a grocery run — a tough assignment for Maverick’s 12 brilliant but still-untested pilots, played by actors including Lewis Pullman, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez and a terrific Glen Powell as a smug, know-it-all Iceman type. And then there’s the hotheaded Rooster (Miles Teller, sullen as only he can be), whose candidacy is complicated by the fact that his late father was Maverick’s wingman and best friend, Goose (the great Anthony Edwards, seen here in brief shards of footage from the first “Top Gun”). Talk about chickens coming home to roost.

Rooster’s background is a ludicrous contrivance. It’s also the perfect setup for the kind of rich, thorny cross-generational soap opera that — as much as its aspect-ratio-fluctuating flight sequences and its climactic surge of Lady Gaga — is this movie’s reason for being. Those planes may be powered by fuel, but “Top Gun: Maverick” runs on pure, unfiltered dad energy. Try not to smile whenever Cruise’s Maverick flashes a mischievous avuncular grin beneath his helmet and chases his young charges in F/A-18s all over the Mojave Desert, teaching them new moves while wasting no chance to reassert his own superiority. Back on the ground, Maverick and Rooster’s surrogate daddy-son tensions flare into the open, exacerbated by guilt, resentment and their recognition of their shared stubbornness.

The drama might have taken on an intriguingly Oedipal edge if the filmmakers had thought to bring back, say, Meg Ryan as Carole, Goose’s wife and Rooster’s mother. But here, with the exception of Monica Barbaro as one of Maverick’s most gifted proteges, women are few and far between, and even the more prominent ones get mostly perfunctory treatment. With no sign of Kelly McGillis as the Navy instructor who once took Maverick’s breath away, it falls to another flame, Penny (a lovely, underused Jennifer Connelly), to mix a few drinks, provide a flicker of romantic distraction and snuff out the first film’s lingering homoerotic vibes. Not that there are many such whiffs here, and more’s the pity: Kosinski, who previously directed Cruise in the shiny, empty science-fiction drama “Oblivion,” is a skilled craftsman with none of Scott’s horned-up filmmaking energy. (He does salute the original with an opening blast of “Danger Zone” and a rousing game of football in the surf, though the latter is more team-building than steam-building exercise.)

Scott’s admirers may miss that disreputable edge, the unrepentantly vulgar sensibility that made the original “Top Gun” a dreamy, voluptuous hoot. There’s some compensation in Kosinski’s fight and flight sequences, full of face-melting ascents, whiplash-inducing loop-de-loops and other airborne stunts that prove considerably more transporting and immersive than what the first “Top Gun” was able to accomplish. That’s only to be expected, given the more sophisticated hardware involved. Like any proper commercial for the military-industrial complex, “Top Gun: Maverick” teases the latest cutting-edge advances in aeronautics and defense technology, a field that has evolved roughly in step with an ever more digitally subsumed movie industry.

At the same time, thanks to Cruise and Kosinski’s unfashionable insistence on practical filmmaking and their refusal to lean too heavily on computer-generated visual effects, their sequel plays like a throwback in more than one sense. But the era that produced the first film has shifted, and “Top Gun: Maverick” is especially poignant in the ways, both subtle and overt, that it acknowledges the passage of time, the fading of youth and the shifting of its own status as a pop cultural phenomenon. The original was a risky, relatively low-budget underdog that somehow became a perfectly imperfect movie for its moment, soaring on the wings of its dreamy eroticism and recruitment-commercial aesthetics, a mega-hit soundtrack and an incandescent star. It ushered in a new era of decadence for its producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and for the many gung-ho American blockbusters they would keep cranking out.

“Top Gun: Maverick” is a longer, costlier and appreciably weightier affair, and its expanded emotional scope and heightened production values (including a score by the original film’s composer, Harold Faltermeyer) give it a classy, elegiac sheen; it’s like a hot summer diversion in prestige-dinosaur drag, or vice versa. As a rare big-budget Hollywood movie about men and women who fly without capes, it has a lot riding on it. Once set for a summer 2020 release but delayed almost two years by the pandemic, it arrives bearing the hopes and dreams of a tentatively resurgent industry that could use a non-Marvel theatrical hit. And as such, everything about its story — from the intergenerational conflict to the high stakes of Maverick’s mission to the rusted-out F-14s collecting dust at the periphery of the action — carries an unmistakable subtext. Is this movie one of the last gasps of a dying Hollywood empire? Or is its emotionally stirring, viscerally gripping and proudly old-fashioned storytelling the latest adrenaline shot that the industry so desperately needs?

It’s hard to consider any of this apart from Cruise, whose attention-grabbing actions during an earlier phase of the pandemic — shooting a video of himself going to see “Tenet” in a packed London theater , verbally lashing members of his “Mission: Impossible” crew for flouting COVID-19 protocols — suggest a man who’s placed the weight of an entire troubled industry on his own shoulders. His endless search for the perfect action vehicle has sometimes felt like a quest for some elusive fountain of Hollywood youth, and it’s led to gratifying highs ( “Edge of Tomorrow” ) and inexplicable lows ( “The Mummy” ). Like Maverick, to whom someone wise once said, “Son, your ego is writing checks that your body can’t cash,” Cruise just won’t quit, won’t give up, won’t listen to anyone who tells him no. As a sometime fan of Cruise’s egomania, at least when he’s dangling from a helicopter or literally running to catch a plane, I’m not really complaining.

And so there’s some irony and maybe even a hint of self-awareness in the fact that while Cruise owns just about every moment of this movie, another star winds up stealing it. As Iceman, Maverick’s old adversary turned wingman, mentor and ally, Val Kilmer haunts “Top Gun: Maverick” from its earliest moments but enters it surprisingly late, anchoring a perfectly timed, beautifully played scene that kicks the movie into emotional overdrive. Watching Ice as he greets and counsels Maverick, you may find yourself thinking about the actor playing him, about the recent toll on his health and the rickety trajectory of his own post-’80s and ’90s career, subjects that were illuminated by the recent documentary “Val.” In one fictional moment, he gives us something unmistakably, irreducibly real, partly by puncturing the fantasy of human invincibility that his co-star has never stopped trying to sell.

‘Top Gun: Maverick’

Rated: PG-13, for sequences of intense action, and some strong language Running time: 2 hours, 17 minutes Playing: Starts May 27 in general release

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Top Gun: Maverick review: A high-flying sequel gets it right

The need for speed comes with a fresh young cast, but the Cruise control remains.

In Top Gun: Maverick 's opening scene, someone makes the mistake of asking Tom Cruise to take his fighter jet to Mach 9. He pauses, then flashes that megawatt Cheshire grin. Never mind that it's a practice run; there is only one Mach he knows, and it is 10 (or maybe 10.2). That's because he's a maverick, the Maverick — Captain Pete Mitchell of the United States Navy, a rogue's rogue for whom clouds part and Hans Zimmer synths soar.

He's also 36 years older than the cocky young lieutenant he played on screen in the 1986 original , a bare fact that the sequel (in theaters May 27) both elides and celebrates in a movie whose bright stripes and broad strokes feel somehow bombastic and tenderheartedly nostalgic at the same time. Imagine a world where motorcyclists scoff at helmets, all bars burst into jukebox singalongs, and the U.S. military is simply an unblemished agent for good. A few decades ago you didn't have to, because you lived in it; Top Gun: Maverick can because it never left.

Inevitably, a few things have changed: Lady Gaga is on the soundtrack now , and there's a whole new class of lion-cub recruits. But that's still Kenny Loggins' " Danger Zone " chugging over the title credits, and Maverick is still the fastest man alive in an F-14, even if he's never managed to exceed the lowly rank of Captain. "You should be at least a two-star admiral by now, or a Senator," Ed Harris 's Rear Admiral grouses early on, before grudgingly sending him off to the Top Gun base in San Diego. Maverick's constant insubordination and looming obsolescence should have gotten him discharged years ago, he reminds him; instead, he's been saved by an old friend, Iceman ( Val Kilmer ), now an admiral himself.

There's a reason for that intervention: a uranium plant in a heavily guarded secret bunker that needs to be eliminated before it becomes operational for the enemy. (What enemy? Don't ask, don't tell.) And only jets can infiltrate it, if the Academy's ten best recruits can be taught to thread the needle and get out of there alive. Leading the team is Maverick's new job, though the bossman there (a scowling Jon Hamm) is not exactly overjoyed to welcome him — and a promising young pilot called Rooster ( Miles Teller , in a kicky little mustache) even less enthused. That's because Rooster's parents were Goose and Carole (Anthony Edwards and Meg Ryan, who appear only in misty flashbacks), and all he knows is that Pete had something to do with him getting pulled from the fast-track flight program years ago.

Otherwise, Rooster's main rival amongst the new hopefuls is Hangman ( Hidden Figures ' great Glen Powell), a fellow pilot whose smirky antagonism recalls the last movie's Iceman rivalry in everything except the frosted tips (Powell is a more natural kind of blonde, but the square-jawed swagger and resting smug face play the same). Director Joseph Kosinski ( TRON: Legacy ) revels in the sonic-boom rush of their many flight scenes, sending his jets swooping and spinning in impossible, equilibrium-rattling arcs. On the ground, too, his camera caresses every object in its view, almost as if he's making a rippling ad for America itself: The unfurling snap of a boat sail; the gleaming Formica in a desert rest-stop diner; golden bodies playing touch football in the California surf while a magic-hour sun goes down.

That nationalistic glow extends to Maverick's courting of a former paramour, Jennifer Connelly , but there's a bittersweet sentimentality in their reconnection, the kind of unhurried adult romance that doesn't make it on screen much anymore. (A brief interlude with Kilmer, who has largely lost his voice to cancer , is also surprisingly moving.) Kosinksi, of course, has to make his Maverick work with or without the context of the original, and the script, by Peter Craig ( The Batman ) and Justin Marks ( The Jungle Book ) toggles deftly between winking callbacks and standard big-beat action stuff meant to stand on its own. Teller and Powell are breezily appealing, actors at the apex of their youth and beauty, though the movie still belongs in almost every scene to Cruise. At this point in his career, he's not really playing characters so much as variations on a theme — the theme being, perhaps, The Last Movie Star. And in the air up there, he stands alone. Grade: B+

Related content:

• Tom Cruise revisits Goose's Top Gun death in Lady Gaga's 'Hold My Hand' music video
• The sky's the limit for Top Gun: Maverick hotshot Glen Powell
• Val Kilmer says he feels 'a lot better than I sound' after tracheotomy due to throat cancer

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‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Review: The Most Satisfying Summer Action Movie Since ‘Mission: Impossible — Fallout’

David ehrlich.

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In December 2020, a leaked audio snippet from the set of the next “Mission: Impossible” movie revealed star/producer/most intense man alive Tom Cruise absolutely losing his mind at some unnamed crew members who had, he felt, violated the COVID protocols that were allowing the massive studio production to roll cameras during the height of the pandemic. “We are the gold standard,” you might remember him shouting. “They’re back there in Hollywood making movies right now because of us… We are creating thousands of jobs, you motherfuckers!”

Cruise went on to note that he wasn’t interested in apologies: “You can tell it to the people who are losing their fucking homes because the industry is shut down. It’s not going to put food on their table or pay for their college education. That’s what I sleep with every night — the future of this fucking industry!”

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In hindsight, that furious speech was an uncanny echo of several things that Cruise had said “in character” the previous year — months before the first documented COVID-19 case — while shooting “ Top Gun: Maverick .”

In one scene, legendary Navy fighter pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell fires back at a class of arrogant young hotshots after they fail a high-stakes training exercise, the aging veteran telling his students to save their sorries for the families of the wingmen they might leave for dead if they don’t learn to fly right. In another, Captain Pete screams above the American West at the controls of an experimental Navy fighter jet as it strains to hit Mach10 in defiance of the hard-ass admiral (obviously Ed Harris) who wants to shut the whole program down. Ordered to return to base, our hero grits his teeth, reflects on all the people who will lose their jobs if the government diverts funding towards drones at the expense of human pilots, and pushes the aircraft so fast that it breaks apart at the seams. “The future is coming,” the admiral growls when he finally confronts Pete face-to-face. “And you’re not in it.”

It’s become an increasingly self-evident truth that Cruise is the last Hollywood movie star of his kind — short as ever but still larger-than-life in an age where most famous actors are only as big as their action figures — and the new “Top Gun” isn’t exactly subtle about the self-commentary it offers on that situation. From new recruits to grizzled vets, every character in this film regards Maverick as both a relic and a god (sometimes in the same breath). Even the guy’s on-again off-again love interest, a thinly written bar owner who Jennifer Connelly wills into a flesh-and-blood woman, thinks of him as an old flame whose light has never gone out.

Watching Cruise pilot a fighter jet 200 feet above the floor of Death Valley, corkscrew another one through Washington’s Cascade Mountains, and give one of the most vulnerable performances of his career while sustaining so many G-forces that you can practically see him going Clear in real-time, you realize — more lucidly than ever before — that this wild-eyed lunatic makes movies like his life depends on it. Because it does, and not for the first time.

But if “Maverick” can’t quite match “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” for sheer kineticism and well-orchestrated awe, this long-delayed sequel does more to clarify what that means than anything Cruise has ever made. And the reason for that is simple: Tom Cruise is Maverick, and Maverick is Tom Cruise.

And while that may have been true since the moment Tony Scott’s “Top Gun” first hit theaters in 1986, the movie that minted the baby-faced kid from “Risky Business” as a bonafide icon rings so hollow for the same reason: Back then, being Tom Cruise didn’t mean anything. Joseph Kosinski ’s “Maverick,” on the other hand, is such a confidently rapturous, emotionally involving, take-your-breath away great time at the movies because it shares its star’s bone-deep awareness that being Tom Cruise now means everything . If “Top Gun” was a fun film because it invented Tom Cruise, “Maverick” is a great film because it immortalizes him. It’s not a Tom Cruise movie so much as it’s “Tom Cruise: The Movie,” and by the time it’s over, even his fiercest critics might have to admit that they’ll miss him when he’s gone.

Of course, “Top Gun” was more than just a watershed moment for the toothy mogul-in-the-making who piloted it to box office success (effectively cementing it as one of modern history’s greatest military recruitment campaigns along the way). Crystallizing a vibe that was already fading into the afterburner-orange sunset behind it, the Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer mega-hit was and remains a veritable coke orgy of Reagan-era expansionism, comically unexamined homoeroticism (courtesy of Hollywood’s sweatiest rising stars), and synth-driven needle drops that target your brain’s pleasure centers with the frightening power of a MiG-28.

Composed like a symphony and plotted like a ham sandwich, “Top Gun” is a surface-to-air missile of Hollywood spectacle that balances the thrust of high-flying aerial footage with the drag of low-stakes storytelling. It endures, despite its general soullessness, because of how vividly it captures a moment in time when American men felt like they would live forever — which is why the film’s most indelible moment comes when one of them dies.

“Maverick” flips the script on “Top Gun” in almost every way that matters, despite — or perhaps because — it remains so faithful to its structure and “nothing to see here!” political outlook. Stainless where the original was musty, neutered where the original was soft-core (there isn’t a single gratuitous shower scene in this sequel, let alone three of them), and structured like an immaculate pop song where the original moved like freeform jazz, “Maverick” sounds like a major regression from an age where summer movies didn’t always play safe.

But let’s not forget that Cruise is the only guy whose summer movies still vehemently refuse to do that. In most cases, that unwillingness to play it safe translates into Cruise performing some insane stunt that could get him killed. In “Maverick,” a movie in which the actor launches an F/A-18 off the flight-deck of the USS Theodore Roosevelt as a mere appetizer for the holy shit, they did this all for real aerial theatrics to come, Cruise’s usual “what if I made a $200 million snuff film?” routine is textured and deepened by an unusually palpable obsession with death. Where “Top Gun” was fueled by a feeling of invincibility, this sequel draws its strength from an awareness of inevitability.

“Time is your greatest adversary,” Maverick barks at the cocky pilots he’s been ordered to train for a suicide mission three weeks away. And while it’s true that “Fanboy” (Danny Ramirez), “Phoenix” (Monica Barbaro, effortlessly adding women into the mix), “Hangman” (Glen Powell, grinning up a storm in his note-perfect turn as Iceman 2.0), and the rest of the new class will only have 150 seconds to zip under “the enemy’s” defenses and bomb a ridiculously well-fortified uranium-enrichment plant before it goes operational, the double-meaning of that dialogue is as unsubtle as everything else in this movie.

Once upon a time, Maverick was an entitled, nepotistic jackass who (figuratively) got away with murder because he was such a special little boy. Now, almost 40 years later, it’s embarrassing to see how little he’s changed. Or, more accurately, how hard he’s tried to keep things from changing. Maverick seems to believe that by staying a captain forever — by refusing promotions or retirement for almost half a century — he could live in his glory days forever. In that light, he should be thrilled by the invitation to return to the same Naval Fighter Weapons School where he trained (and eventually taught) in the original “Top Gun.” What better way to make time stand still?

Alas, you can only fly away from the international dateline for so long before you reach tomorrow, and it’s clear that Maverick is almost there. For one thing, the base’s dick-swinging “air boss” ( Jon Hamm in full-on “that’s what the money is for!” mode) takes every chance to remind Maverick that this will be his last assignment. For another, Maverick’s absent wingmen can’t help but remind him that time is always on his tail. Goose is still dead — sad how that works — and Iceman isn’t the perfectly symmetrical Übermensch he used to be. As for “Top Gun” love interest Charlotte Blackwood? Maverick doesn’t even want to know.

If Maverick is desperate to make time stand still, he’s absolutely terrified of allowing it to repeat itself. The look on Cruise’s face when he sees Goose’s resentful son step into his classroom… it’s like he saw a ghost, or at least a Paramount executive who threatened to release one of his movies day-and-date. Played by an uncharacteristically effective Miles Teller — who does an uncanny job of channeling Anthony Edwards, and mines genuine feeling out of begrudging unlikeability — Rooster is still mighty pissed off by Maverick’s involvement in his late father’s death, and the strained relationship between this young hotshot and his stone-faced new flight instructor forms the emotional bedrock of the story. Neither one of them knows how to let go, but that character flaw might just turn out to be an asset in disguise.

Ehren Kruger, Christopher McQuarrie, and Eric Warren Singer’s well-engineered script doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but “Maverick” is all about old-school thrills in defiance of a new world order, and the joy of watching it is anchored in a certain degree of predictability. Much like the original, “Maverick” is a drama steam-baked in so much testosterone and repressed male emotion that it sweats into an action movie. Unlike the original — which, in an historic moment of dumb screenwriting, drops its climactic mission on its hotshots while they were literally still at the Top Gun graduation ceremony — “Maverick” builds up to a particular mission from the start, and drills every detail about it into our heads as if we’ll have to fly it ourselves (those details will have to make room next to the melody of Lady Gaga’s end credits anthem “Hold My Hand,” which is used as score throughout the film to wonderful effect).

When the action finally starts, not even the wildest aerial maneuvers can disorient us. Factor in Kosinski’s ultra-crisp direction (made possible by Claudio Miranda’s camera-in-the-cockpit cinematography), and you have a series of character-driven, heart-in-your-throat dogfights more vivid than anything in the first previous film. Kosinski may not be able to match Tony Scott’s formalist bravado, but he makes up for it with speed, clarity, and a moral imperative to push the limits of what seems possible. Kosinski feels the need… the need… to remind multiplex audiences of what’s possible when people give their entire bodies to a movie instead of simply lending them to a brand (not as catchy, I’ll admit). So what if America’s top guns “no longer possess the technological advantage”? It’s the pilot, not the plane.

It’s certainly not the country. War hawks and Navy recruiters will naturally have a field day with this film, but misgivings about its (absent) politics are mitigated by a story that plays more like an IMAX-sized character study than it does a plea to funnel money towards the United States’ military budget. It’s a blockbuster about the glory of pyrrhic victories, itself a pyrrhic victory against blockbusters.

But if movie stardom is as obsolete as the kind of movies that stars used to make, “obsolete” isn’t the same as “over.” As Maverick whispers at a crucial moment: “There’s still time.” It’s clear that Cruise and Maverick are on their way out — just as this film makes it clear that neither one of them can find someone worthy to whom they can pass the torch — but it’s never too late to live forever. Not for the last star who’s still willing to put every fiber of his being into the movies he makes. Neither Tom Cruise nor Maverick may be in the future, but that will have to be the future’s loss.

Paramount Pictures will release “Top Gun: Maverick” in theaters on Friday, May 27.

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Top Gun: Maverick Review

Maverick is back in a higher-flying sequel to remember..

Top Gun: Maverick debuts in theaters on May 24, 2022.

The spirit of the ‘80s soars sky-high in Joseph Kosinski's Top Gun: Maverick. Every scene drips with the neon-yellow cheesiness that makes Tony Scott's beloved flyboy action flick so tasty. The original Top Gun rarely took itself seriously amidst all the sweaty co-pilot homoeroticism, and the same goes for Top Gun: Maverick outside a few modern tweaks. Women are no longer relegated to solely being love interests, and someone installed an air conditioner in Fightertown, USA — yet none of the renegade attitudes, forced overdramatics, and aerial thrills throttle backward. The iconic title theme guitar riff wails within seconds and takes our proverbial breath away.

Top Gun: Maverick can't help but indulge the original film's emphasis on soap opera drama without any wasted time. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is still the same rule-breaker 30 years later, who we meet breaking protocol and defying orders for a special operation that's about to be canned. Cruise is still fearless, showing that same giddiness inside a cockpit, and his character finds himself sent back to Top Gun after pissing off yet another admiral (played by Ed Harris) who can't believe Captain Maverick lives to fly another day. Familiarity is the name of the introduction, as Maverick finds himself an instructor amongst ace Top Gun graduates summoned back by commanding officer "Cyclone" (Jon Hamm) for what's assumed to be one notch below a suicide mission.

It's the Top Gun sequel purists will crave. Miles Teller as Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw, the son of Anthony Edwards’ “Goose,” is the spitting image of his late on-screen father, from his piano rendition of "Great Balls of Fire" to his bushy caterpillar mustache. As Penny Benjamin, Jennifer Connelly steps comfortably into the role of Maverick's ex-fling and rekindled romantic interest, replacing Kelly McGillis’ Charlie with nary a mention. Glen Powell’s "Hangman" is the hot-shot that reminds of Maverick's in-flight cockiness, and so comparisons continue. Plotlines thicken with the speed of quick-drying cement, because Top Gun: Maverick is the butteriest type of popcorn entertainment. You're here for the cowboy antics, shirtless beach sports, and close calls with multi-million-dollar aircrafts — which Top Gun: Maverick delivers without all those messy storytelling complexities.

New additions to the formula are welcome, like "Phoenix" (Monica Barbaro) — and actress Kara Wang to a lesser degree as a background Top Gunner — breaking down the boys club towel-whipping that dominates the original. That's not to say all the screaming about butts and skin-on-skin caresses in shower rooms isn't missed — it's part of Top Gun's DNA — but writers Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Christopher McQuarrie create a tighter yet equally silly screenplay. Dialogue is still torn from some Hallmark Naval academy program because the film can't resist throwing Goose's son into the mix or handing Maverick a seemingly impossible task. Although, Maverick loves impossible odds and making Jon Hamm's tight-buttoned commander pucker in frustration as much as we love watching Maverick's insubordinate behavior — so that's not entirely an issue.

What's your favorite Tom Cruise movie?

Nearly 40 years after the original’s release, Top Gun: Maverick impressively capitalizes on advancements to dogfight filmmaking. Top Gun was revolutionary for its time, but Top Gun: Maverick leaves the outdated ‘80s action flick in the dust thanks to Claudio Miranda's breakneck cinematography. Whether it's green screens or cockpit-mounted cameras, everything from routine training drills to overhead combat looks immeasurably crisp. Kosinski suspends us in mid-air for a bird's eye view of Maverick's hazardous teaching methods — zooming between his pupils with a smile while they gasp at the playful negligence. Everything, down to the misty streams that flow around the glass bubble that protects the pilots, exists with excruciating detail as Maverick, Rooster, and the rest race against time and once-friendly lessons turn to free-fire military applications. When Kenny Loggins was singing about danger zones, he probably imagined what would become Top Gun: Maverick.

There's no argument that Top Gun: Maverick manages to rocket into our hearts, but it's not exactly the tidiest screenplay. It all returns to that trademark silliness because the emotional stakes are often scooped in single servings. That didn’t rob me of any smiles, but I couldn’t ignore how much Top Gun: Maverick honors Top Gun — even down to ridiculous plot advancements that always put Maverick on the path to personal reconciliation or victory. Expect no-stakes entertainment in terms of showing up to a movie theater and disconnecting for about two hours as airplanes go "whoosh, where Maverick swears never to let another wingman or wingwoman die on his watch [slams fist on the table for dramatic effect]. But rest assured, that's not entirely a killjoy ding – I type that having just smiled through Top Gun: Maverick.

Top Gun: Maverick is an out-of-bounds blast of afterburner fumes and thrillseeker highs that's sure to please audiences looking for a classic summer blockbuster. Director Joseph Kosinski doesn't lose the ‘80s nostalgia of movies that were light on reason and huge on chest-beating heroism. The fresh graduate faces are all aces, fighter jet choreography exceptional, and pursuit of excitement at Mach levels. It's never an exceptionally thoughtful movie about pilots pushed to the brink by Naval command, but it doesn't have to be when an insatiable need for speed propels standout action sequences. Top Gun: Maverick is good ol' cheesy as hell, silly-heroic entertainment with mile-high enthusiasm — a welcome throwback to simpler cinematic times.

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Top Gun: Maverick

After thirty years, Maverick is still pushing the envelope as a top naval aviator, but must confront ghosts of his past when he leads TOP GUN's elite graduates on a mission that demands the ... Read all After thirty years, Maverick is still pushing the envelope as a top naval aviator, but must confront ghosts of his past when he leads TOP GUN's elite graduates on a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those chosen to fly it. After thirty years, Maverick is still pushing the envelope as a top naval aviator, but must confront ghosts of his past when he leads TOP GUN's elite graduates on a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those chosen to fly it.

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• Trivia At the insistence of Tom Cruise , minimal green screen and CGI aerial shots exist in the film, and even the close up cockpit shots were taken during real in-flight sequences. This meant that much of the cast had to undergo extensive G-force training sessions to withstand the physical demands of G-force pressures during flights.
• Goofs At 1h12'10" Coyote is in G-LOC, releases the stick and his aircraft falls towards the ground. Super-hornet are equipped with auto GCAS (automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System), which would react to the situation and take control to climb and level at a safe altitude with no obstacles.

Rear Admiral : Maverick. Thirty-plus years of service. Combat medals. Citations. Only man to shoot down three enemy planes in the last 40 years.

[Cain looks through pages of Maverick's records]

Rear Admiral : 'Distinguished.' 'Distinguished.' 'Distinguished.' Yet you can't get a promotion, you won't retire, and, despite your best efforts, you refuse to die. You should be at least a two-star admiral by now, if not a senator. Yet here you are: Captain. Why is that?

Maverick : It's one of life's mysteries, sir.

Rear Admiral : This isn't a joke. I asked you a question.

Maverick : I'm where I belong, sir.

Rear Admiral : Well, the navy doesn't see it that way. Not anymore.

Rear Admiral : These planes you've been testing, Captain, one day, sooner or later, they won't need pilots at all. Pilots that need to sleep, eat, take a piss. Pilots that disobey orders. All you did was buy some time for those men out there. The future is coming, and you're not in it.

[Cain faces the officer by the door]

Rear Admiral : Escort this man off the base. Take him to his quarters. Wait with him while he packs his gear. I want him on the road to North Island within the hour.

[surprised look on Maverick's face]

Maverick : North Island, sir?

Rear Admiral : Call came in with impeccable timing, right as I was driving here to ground your ass once and for all. It galls me to say it, but... for reasons known only to the Almighty and your guardian angel, you've been called back to Top Gun.

Maverick : Sir?

Rear Admiral : You are dismissed, Captain.

[Maverick proceeds to leave Cain's office]

Rear Admiral : The end is inevitable, Maverick. Your kind is headed for extinction.

[Maverick turns around]

Maverick : Maybe so, sir. But not today.

• Crazy credits "Top Gun 001: Tom Cruise" is listed among the other pilots who worked on the film.
• Connections Featured in Conan: Tom Cruise (2019)
• Soundtracks Danger Zone From Top Gun (1986) Original Soundtrack Written by Giorgio Moroder & Tom Whitlock Performed by Kenny Loggins Courtesy of Columbia Records By arrangement with Sony Music Entertainment

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• May 27, 2022 (United States)
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• IMAX 6-Track
• 12-Track Digital Sound

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‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Review: Tom Cruise Takes to the Skies, Literally, in Barrier-Breaking Sequel

Reteaming with 'Oblivion' director Joseph Kosinski, the perfectionist producer-star insists on flying his own planes in this stunning follow-up.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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The world is not the same place it was in 1986, when “Top Gun” ruled the box office. In Ronald Reagan, America had a movie star for a president, and producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson as its honorary ministers of propaganda. The same year that “Platoon” challenged the United States’ militaristic track record, “Top Gun” sold a thrilling if narrow-minded fantasy of American exceptionalism — of boys and their toys, of macho-man bromance and what it means to be the best. Three years after Tom Cruise flipped the bird to a Russian MiG fighter plane, the Berlin Wall fell. Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed.

One could argue that our new, post-Cold War world didn’t need a “Top Gun” sequel. (Tom Cruise himself once insisted as much.) But one would be wrong to do so. Building on the three-parts-steel-to-one-part-corn equation that director Tony Scott so effectively set 36 years earlier, the new film more than merits its existence, mirroring Cruise’s character, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, in pushing the limits of what the machine could do — the machine in this case being cinema, which takes to the skies as no blockbuster has before.

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Hardly anything in “ Top Gun: Maverick ” will surprise you, except how well it does nearly all the things audiences want and expect it to do. Orchestrated by Joseph Kosinski — the dynamo who collaborated with Cruise on “Oblivion” and first worked with Miles Teller on 2017’s terrific, underseen firefighter drama “Only the Brave” — to appeal to veterans and neophytes alike, this high-performance follow-up sends Maverick back to the Topgun program, where he won the heart of Charlie (Kelly McGillis) and lost best friend Goose (Anthony Edwards).

Popular on Variety

Flashbacks notwithstanding, neither of those actors is in this movie, though the screenplay — a tag-team effort between Christopher McQuarrie (Cruise’s guy), Eric Warren Singer (Kosinski’s guy) and Ehren Kruger (yikes) — just about resurrects Goose via his now-adult son, Bradley Bradshaw (Teller), call sign “Rooster.” (“Phoenix” would be more apt, but that tag goes to Monica Barbaro, playing the lone woman in this testosterone pool.) The resemblance between Rooster and his late dad is uncanny, courtesy of a goofy moustache, some hair gel and a scene in which the young pilot pounds out “Great Balls of Fire” on the Hard Deck piano, the way Goose once did.

The Hard Deck is now operated by a character from Maverick’s past, Penny Benjamin ( Jennifer Connelly ), although she was only referenced in passing before: In “Top Gun,” Maverick is chewed out by his superior officer for having “a history of high-speed passes over five air control towers — and one admiral’s daughter!” Penny is that daughter: strong, independent and responsible for a daughter of her own (not Maverick’s, and too young to be his love interest). Cruise’s character has matured on the womanizing front, and the movie provides a shallow yet satisfying romantic subplot between him and Penny, which gives him something to come home for, since his daredevil tendencies otherwise give off strong kamikaze vibes.

In theory, Maverick should have graduated Topgun and gone back to teach what he’d learned to other Navy pilots. But after losing his flying partner, the character wound up being more of a loner — or so we learn, catching up with him all these years later, working as a test pilot and stuck at the rank of captain. Following a nostalgia-baiting aircraft carrier landing montage, wherein “Top Gun” theme “Danger Zone” blazes once again, Kosinski tracks Maverick to the Mojave Desert, still living up to his nickname when he takes a multimillion-dollar piece of government equipment — a supersonic, SR-71 Blackbird-style (fictional) Darkstar jet — out for a speed test.

Showing up as none-too-amused Navy brass, Ed Harris arrives just in time to eat a face full of sand as Maverick takes off at rocket speed, gently pushing the plane to Mach 10. (As a point of reference, the F-14s seen in “Top Gun” top out around Mach 2.) It’s a glorious scene, and one that melds everything Maverick once represented with Cruise’s own off-screen personality — which also explains all the self-driven motorcycle rides. The stunt nearly gets Maverick kicked out of the Navy. His only option: Go back to the training academy, where Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer) is now filling Tom Skerritt/Viper’s shoes.

The script incorporates Kilmer’s throat cancer, such that Iceman has just one scene, communicating mostly by keyboard — but it’s a smart one, paying off the way the dynamic between these two ex-rivals has evolved. Considering the importance Goose and Rooster play in this next mission, which involves a near-impossible airstrike on a uranium plant, it would’ve been nice to see Meg Ryan return as the widow/mom, but the rules are cruel when it comes to aging female actors. Meanwhile, we can talk about all the cosmetic ways Cruise and Kilmer’s faces have evolved, although there’s only one change that matters: Cruise has perfected that little jaw-clenching trick that signifies “This is a really tough call.”

He won’t get an Oscar for pantomiming such swallow-your-pride stoicism, though Cruise deserves one for everything else the role demanded of him: If the flying scenes here blow your mind, it’s because a great many of them are the real deal, putting audiences right there in the cockpit alongside a cast who learned to pilot for their parts. The idea here is that Maverick has been grounded, relegated to coaching a dozen top-of-their-class hotshots, though he takes to the skies right away, trumping all of these aces in a series of adrenaline-fueled drills. Not a one of these students is convincing as a Navy pilot, though their personalities win us over all the same (even Glen Powell’s alpha-male “Hangman,” who serves as this movie’s Iceman equivalent), and once can imagine future spinoffs involving any of these characters.

“Top Gun” has always been “The Tom Cruise Show,” and no one believes for a second that Maverick won’t maneuver his way into flying the climactic mission. But he can’t do it alone: The operation calls for perfectly coordinated teamwork among six pilots, recalling the group air battle that bonded Iceman and Maverick in the original movie.

These days, videogame-styled blockbusters rely so heavily on CGI that it’s thrilling to see the impact of gravity on actual human beings, pancaked to their chairs by multiple G-forces. Sophisticated movie magic makes their performances seamless with the exterior airborne shots, while the commitment to filming practically everything practically feels like the cutting-edge equivalent of Howard Hughes’ history-making “Hell’s Angels.” The result is the most immersive flight simulator audiences will have ever experienced, right down to the great Dolby roar of engines vibrating through their seats (while the score teases cues for Lady Gaga’s end-credits anthem “Hold My Hand”).

Early on, Ed Harris’ character warns Maverick and his team that “one day, they won’t need pilots at all,” by which he means, drone technology is not far from allowing the Navy to do all of its flying by remote control. Cinema seems to be moving in that same direction, replacing actors with digital puppets and real locations with greenscreen plates — but not if Tom Cruise has anything to do with it. Engineered to hit so many of the same pleasure points as the original, “Top Gun: Maverick” fulfills our desire to go really fast, really far above ground — what the earlier film unforgettably referred to as “the need for speed.”

Still, this buckle-up follow-up also demonstrates why we feel the need for movie stars. It goes well beyond Cruise’s rah-rah involvement in what amounts to a glorified U.S. military recruitment commercial (the 1986 film might have been as perfectly calibrated as a Swiss watch, but it wasn’t subtle about its GI Joe agenda). It’s the way we identify with the guy when he’s doing what most of us thought impossible. Turns out we need Maverick now more than ever.

Reviewed at AMC Century City 15 (Imax), May 10, 2022. In Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition). MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 130 MIN.

• Production: A Paramount Pictures release of a Paramount Pictures, Skydance, Jerry Bruckheimer Films presentation of a Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer production. Producers: Jerry Bruckheimer, Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie, David Ellison. Executive producers: Tommy Harper, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, Chad Oman, Mike Stenson.
• Crew: Director: Joseph Kosinski. Screenplay: Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, Christopher McQuarrie; story: Peter Craig, Justin Marks, based on characters created by Jim Cash & Jack Epps Jr. Camera: Claudio Miranda. Editor: Eddie Hamilton. Music: Lorne Balfe, Harold Faltermeyer, Hans Zimmer.
• With: Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Charles Parnell, Bashir Salahuddin, Monica Barbaro, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Greg Tarzan Davis, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer.

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Top Gun: Maverick Reviews

Ohh right this is what movies used to be like.

Full Review | Apr 24, 2024

Top Gun: Maverick is the reason why I go to the movies and why Tom Cruise is the biggest movie star in the world. WHAT. A RIDE.

Full Review | Sep 27, 2023

Maverick dished out generous amounts of bromance, action, and a truly-immersive narrative in swashbuckling style, and Cruise’s iconic grin was still the greatest thing to take away from it.

Full Review | Sep 13, 2023

It is all of the flying sequences that are shot in such a way that it makes the moviegoer feel like they are a passenger that gives the movie its energy and makes it so much fun.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Aug 9, 2023

Top Gun: Maverick is a surprising stunner crafted with pure adrenaline and kerosene.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 29, 2023

Tom Cruise might save cinema.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

SPECTACULAR! One of the best cinematic experiences I have truly ever had in a theater. Heartfelt, exhilarating & down right emotional. Tom Cruise turns in one of his best performances & Top Gun 2 becomes one of his best films in his Career.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

The return of pure, nostalgic blockbusters. The best aerial action sequences ever amaze even the highest expectations, not only due to the absolutely insane real stunts but largely because of the flawless contribution of all filmmaking elements.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 25, 2023

The final scenes are truly nail biting, with intense flight sequences that result in Tom Cruise’s cast members going from nearly unknown performers, to A-list stars in a matter of minutes.

Top Gun: Maverick is the rare sequel that elevates its source material and creates a new, worthwhile story. A high-octane thrill ride that celebrates where Maverick's been and where he’s going.

The film is pure ideology, pure militarism, generic, and like the first Top Gun in 1986, undemanding.

Full Review | Mar 16, 2023

Women in Top Gun: Maverick don’t see much development, but written dialogue and camerawork treat them with respect.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Mar 6, 2023

There’s no reason in the world it should have worked, but it does.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Feb 21, 2023

A movie-movie with an old-school movie star, this actioner is best seen in theatres, where the dazzling fighter-jet sequences will make you dizzy.

Full Review | Feb 10, 2023

All of these elements come together to form one of the biggest third acts in recent cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Feb 10, 2023

While other actors disappear behind their roles, Tom Cruise wants you to know it's him. This movie uses all of its technical marvel to bring us back to an adrenaline-filled formula blockbuster full of emotion. Made for the movies. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Feb 6, 2023

Top Gun: Maverick is a little bloated at times and could have used a bit of trimming, especially in its third act, but there’s no denying the magnetic energy the film brings to the viewer.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 6, 2023

"It’s a valid critical interpretation that Top Gun: Maverick is merely propaganda wrapped in a very pretty bow. But boy, that bow is really something."

Full Review | Feb 4, 2023

Its a sure-footed performance from an actor that never fails to hold the attention of its audience.

Full Review | Jan 31, 2023

A big jingoistic cartoon. But it’s a fun jingoistic cartoon...

Full Review | Jan 23, 2023

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Tom cruise in ‘top gun: maverick’: film review.

The ace fighter pilot returns 36 years after first feeling the need for speed in Joseph Kosinski’s sequel, also starring Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly and Jon Hamm.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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As inescapable a pop-cultural totem as 1986’s Top Gun became, Tony Scott’s testosterone-powered blockbuster has all the narrative complexity of a music video crossed with a military recruitment reel. It’s hard to think of many more emblematic products of the rah-rah patriotism of the Reagan years, with its vigorous salute to American exceptionalism and triumph over a Cold War enemy left purposely vague — hey, don’t want to shut out a lucrative foreign market.

All that has only continued to toxify in the post-Trump age, with patriotism curdling into white supremacy. So depending on where you sit on the political spectrum, your enjoyment of Top Gun: Maverick might depend on how much you’re willing to shut out the real world and surrender to movie-star magic.

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Venue : Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition) Release date : Friday, May 27 Cast : Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Lewis Pullman, Charles Parnell, Bashir Salahuddin, Monica Barbaro, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Greg Tarzan Davis Director : Joseph Kosinski Screenwriters : Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, Christopher McQuarrie

Which this superior sequel — directed with virtuoso technical skill, propulsive pacing and edge-of-your-seat flying sequences by Joseph Kosinski — has in abundance. Every frame of Tom Cruise ’s Maverick is here to remind you, soaking up the awestruck admiration of the young hot shots ready to dismiss him as a fossil and the initially begrudging respect of the military brass who try and fail to pull the cocky individualist into line. “He’s the fastest man alive,” one of the slack-jawed hero worshippers in the control room says early on. And that’s even before he does his signature robotic “Cruise Run.”

“It’s not the plane, it’s the pilot,” we hear more than once. And Cruise leaves no question that he’s the pilot, despite hiring a pro craft team and a solid ensemble cast who were put through extensive flight training. Even the relic F-14 Tomcat, Maverick’s tactical fighter plane of choice in the first movie, gets fired up for a glory lap, a salute to aged movie stars and old technology in one. Cruise’s character is somehow positioned by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie’s screenplay as simultaneously a rule-breaking rebel and a selfless saint. That makes this a work of breathtaking egomania outdone only by the fawning tone of Paramount’s press notes.

Starting when Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” accompanies footage of new-generation F-18 hornets slicing through the clouds and swooping down onto an aircraft carrier amid a sea of high-fives, fist-pumps and thumbs-up, the sequel follows the original beat for beat, to a degree that’s almost comical. And yet, as formulaic as it is, there’s no denying that it delivers in terms of both nostalgia and reinvention. Mainstream audiences will be happily airborne, especially the countless dads who loved Top Gun and will eagerly want to share this fresh shot of adrenaline with their sons.

Pete “Maverick” Mitchell lives alone in a Mojave Desert hangar with a photo shrine on the wall to his former radar intercept officer and best buddy Goose, who died during a training accident in the first film. (Anthony Edwards and Meg Ryan are seen in a helpful recap framed as Pete’s tortured memories.)

Maverick zooms into the Naval base on his Kawasaki each day and continues to get his kicks as a daredevil test pilot, resisting the advancement in rank from captain that would have grounded him by now. But when his aerial showboating pisses off Admiral Cain (Ed Harris), who’s pushing to transition to drone aircrafts and make stick jockeys obsolete, Maverick gets his wings clipped.

Despite having lasted just two months as an instructor almost 30 years ago, he’s reassigned to the elite Fighter Weapons School, aka Top Gun Academy, in San Diego, which was established in 1969 to train the top 1 percent of Naval aviators. Neither Cain nor the academy’s senior officer, call sign “Cyclone” ( Jon Hamm ), wanted him for the job. But Maverick’s former rival and eventual wingman Iceman (Val Kilmer), who went on to become an admiral and command the U.S. Pacific Fleet, convinced them he was the only man who could prepare pilots for a top-secret mission.

A uranium enrichment plant has been detected on enemy soil — once again, exactly which enemy is unclear — and two pairs of F-18s need to sneak in, bomb the bejesus out of it and then get out fast, overcoming a near-impossible quick climb over rocky peaks and then surviving the inevitable blast of enemy missiles and aerial dogfights.

The candidates for that mission are “the best of the best,” former star graduates who are pretty much a repeat of the 1986 bunch aside from being more culturally diverse. There’s even — gasp! — a woman, Phoenix (Monica Barbaro). The two that matter most, though, are swaggering blowhard Hangman (Glen Powell) and Goose’s son Rooster ( Miles Teller ), still carrying around the ghost of his father and hostile to Maverick for stalling his career by taking his name off the Naval Academy list.

The Hangman-Rooster dynamic more or less mirrors the Iceman-Maverick friction from Top Gun , just as the incongruously homoerotic shirtless volleyball scene is echoed here with a rowdy team-building football game on the beach.

The only notable place where the screenwriters don’t genuflect to the original model is with Kelly McGillis’ astrophysicist and civilian Top Gun instructor Charlie, who declined a plum Washington job to stick with her man but doesn’t even rate a mention here. Instead, Maverick sparks up an old romance with Penny ( Jennifer Connelly ), a single mom with fabulous highlights. She runs a local bar — its name, The Hard Deck, doubles as a tactical plot point — which apparently puts her in an income bracket to own a sleek sailboat and drive a Porsche. (Producer Jerry Bruckheimer never met a power vehicle he didn’t love.)

Maverick’s task during training is to test the limits of the super-competitive candidates, whittling them down from 12 to six and choosing a team leader. “It’s not what I am. It’s who I am,” he says of his aviator vocation during a rare moment of self-doubt. “How do I teach that?” Anyone failing to guess who’ll land the team leader spot and who’ll be their wingman isn’t paying attention.

The simmering conflict between Maverick and Rooster — who can’t see past his resentment to perceive the protective responsibility his dad’s friend feels toward him — provides an emotional core even if the role makes scant demands on Teller’s range. But that’s true also of Connelly, Hamm and everyone else in the cast; all of them get the job done while remaining satellites that merely orbit around Cruise’s glittering Planet Alpha, eventually having to acknowledge that Maverick’s a helluva guy no matter what stunts he pulls.

The film’s most moving element comes during the brief screen time of Kilmer’s Iceman, whose health issues reflect those suffered by the actor in real life, generating resonant pathos. There’s reciprocal warmth, even love, in a scene between Iceman and Maverick that acknowledges the characters’ hard-won bond as well as the rivalry that preceded it, with gentle humor.

Kosinski (who directed Cruise in Oblivion ), the writers and editor Eddie Hamilton keep a close eye on the balance between interpersonal drama and flight maneuvers; scenes intercut between field practice and classroom discussions during which Maverick points out fatal errors on a computer simulator are particularly sharp. This is all nuts-and-bolts buildup, however, to the mission itself, in which hair-raising action, seemingly insurmountable setbacks and miraculous saves keep the tension pumped.

This is definitely a film that benefits from the Imax experience and the big-ass soundscape that comes with it. The muscular score by Harold Faltermeyer, Lady Gaga and Hans Zimmer also pulls its weight, with Gaga’s song, “Hold My Hand,” getting prime romantic placement. Musical choices elsewhere tend to lean into a retro vibe — Bowie, T. Rex, Foghat, The Who — while Teller gets to hammer the piano keys and lead a Jerry Lee Lewis sing-along that pays direct homage to his screen dad.

The most memorable part of Top Gun: Maverick — and the scenes that will make new generations swell with pride and adulation for good old American heroism — are the dogfights and tactical maneuvers of the pilots. Just as they should be. The best thing this movie does is boost visceral analog action over the usual numbing bombardment of CG fakery, a choice fortified by having the actors in the airborne cockpits during shooting.

Cinematographer Claudio Miranda’s work benefits from the technological advances of the past three decades, with camera rigs allowing for you-are-there verisimilitude. Cruise’s insistence on doing his own flying is undeniably impressive, even if the headgear’s breathing apparatus gets in the way of his trademark clenched-jaw intensity. No one is going to dispute that he works hard in this movie, justifying the labor of love. But no one is going to come out of it concerned for his self-esteem, either.

Full credits

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition) Distribution: Paramount Production companies: Skydance, Jerry Bruckheimer Films Cast: Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Charles Parnell, Bashir Salahuddin, Monica Barbaro, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Greg Tarzan Davis, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer Director: Joseph Kosinski Screenwriters: Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, Christopher McQuarrie Story: Peter Craig, Justin Marks, based on characters created by Jim Cash, Jack Epps Jr. Producers: Jerry Bruckheimer, Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie, David Ellison Executive producers: Tommy Harper, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, Chad Oman, Mike Stenson Director of photography: Claudio Miranda Production designer: Jeremy Hindle Costume designer: Marlene Stewart Music: Harold Faltermeyer, Lady Gaga, Hans Zimmer Editor: Eddie Hamilton Visual effects supervisor: Ryan Tudhope Aerial coordinator: Kevin LaRosa II Casting: Denise Chamian

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“Top Gun: Maverick,” Reviewed: Tom Cruise Takes Empty Thrills to New Heights

When Ronald Reagan was elected President, in 1980, it seemed only slightly more absurd than if Ronald McDonald had won. Both were entertainers, but the burger clown knew it, whereas Reagan believed the nostalgic and noxious verities of the movies that he had appeared in—and as a politician he attempted to force modern American life to conform to them. Thus “Top Gun,” which I saw when it came out, in 1986, felt like the cultural nadir of a time that was itself something of a nadir. As a film of cheaply rousing drama and jingoistic nonsense, “Top Gun” played like feedback—a shrill distillation of the very world view that it reproduced. Little did we know that there was another, less accomplished yet more bilious entertainer waiting in the wings to wreak even more grievous damage, more than three decades later, on the polity and the national psyche.

No less than the original “Top Gun,” its new sequel, “Top Gun: Maverick,” directed by Joseph Kosinski, is an emblem of its benighted political times. That’s why, in comparison with the sequel, the original comes off as a work of warmhearted humanism. Yet, paradoxically, and disturbingly, “Maverick” is also a more satisfying drama, a more accomplished action film—I enjoyed it more, yet its dosed-out, juiced-up pleasures reveal something terrifying about the implications and the effects of its narrative efficiency.

“Maverick” is less a sequel to “Top Gun” than a renovation of it. The framework of the story is borrowed from the original, nearly scene for scene; drastic changes, while updating it for the present time, leave it recognizable still. In the new film, Tom Cruise returns as Lieutenant Pete Mitchell, whose call sign is Maverick. Now he’s a test pilot at an isolated post in the Mojave Desert, where the project he’s working on—the development of a new airplane—is about to be cancelled in favor of drones, on the pretext of a performance standard that can’t be met. So Maverick, defying an admiral’s order, takes the plane airborne and, against all odds and at grave personal danger, pushes it past Mach 10 (which, for the record, is more than seven thousand miles per hour), thus temporarily saving the project but also risking court martial. Instead, Maverick is sent back to Fighter Weapons School, a.k.a., Top Gun—of which he is, of course, a graduate—in San Diego, summoned by the academy’s commanding officer, Admiral Tom (Iceman) Kazansky, his classmate and respected rival in the first film (again played by Val Kilmer). Maverick’s assignment is to train a dozen young ace pilots for a top-secret and crucial mission, to fly into a mountainous region in an unnamed “rogue” state and destroy a subterranean uranium-enrichment plant.

Yet soon another admiral, Beau (Cyclone) Simpson, played by Jon Hamm, sidelines Maverick and changes the mission’s parameters. In response, Maverick steals another plane and undertakes another unauthorized and dangerous flight, thereby justifying his own set of parameters to Cyclone—who orders him back to lead the younger flyers. Yet Maverick has history with one of those flyers, Lieutenant Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), call sign Rooster, whose late father, Nick (Goose) Bradshaw, played by Anthony Edwards, was Maverick’s wingman in the original “Top Gun” and died saving Maverick’s life. There’s more to that history (spoiler), but the dramatic point is that Maverick has to overcome both the distrust and the enmity of one of the best pilots he’s training—for the sake of the mission, the unit’s esprit de corps, Rooster’s peace of mind, and his own sense of responsibility for a fatherless young man for whom he assumed paternal responsibilities.

There’s also a romance, perhaps the most perfunctory one this side of a children’s movie. Like the one in the original “Top Gun,” it is centered on a bar. This time, Maverick re-meets cute a former lover named Penny (Jennifer Connelly), the owner of the bar where the pilots all hang out. (In the original “Top Gun,” there’s mention of a woman named Penny as one of Maverick’s romantic partners, but the hint goes undeveloped.) What it takes for them to get back together is a kind of barroom hazing that costs Maverick money and dignity, plus a jaunt on her sailboat where she literally teaches him the ropes. (As to what happened between him and Charlie, his instructor and lover in the first film, played by Kelly McGillis, the new film says not a word.) Their relationship is the hollow core around which the movie is modelled, and its emptiness comes off not as accidental or oblivious but as the self-conscious dramatic strategy of the director and the film’s group of screenwriters.

The first ten minutes of “Top Gun”—showing the midair freakout of a pilot called Cougar (John Stockwell)—contain more real emotion than the entire running time of the sequel, and therein lie the key differences between the two films. The powerful feelings, troubled circumstances, and unsettling ambiguities in the original posed dramatic challenges that its director, Tony Scott, and its screenwriters never met. Their film thrusted a handful of significant complexities onto the screen but never explored or resolved them. It wasn’t only Cougar who fell apart in “Top Gun.” Maverick himself, racked with guilt over Goose’s death, first attempted to quit the Navy and then, returning to combat duty, froze up in midair. Of course, Maverick quickly got over it (thanks to Goose’s dog tags), and his suddenly resurgent heroic skills saved the day, brought the movie to a quick triumph, and aroused three decades of impatience for a sequel—but his vulnerability and fallibility at least made a daunting appearance.

By contrast, “Maverick” allows for no such doubts or hesitations. There’s certainly danger in the film, including a pilot who passes out midair and needs to be rescued. Maverick himself ends up in some perilous straits. But none of these situations suggests any weakness or failure of will, any questioning of the mission or of the pilots’ own abilities. The challenges are visceral rather than psychological, technical rather than dramatic, and the script offers them not resolutions but merely solutions—ones that are as impersonal as putting a key in a lock and as gratifying as hearing it click open. “Maverick” feels less written and directed than engineered. It is a work that achieves a certain sort of perfection, a perfect substancelessness—which is a deft way of making its forceful, and wildly political, implicit subject matter pass unnoticed.

Again, comparison with the original is telling. Whatever else the original “Top Gun” is, it’s a movie of procedure. The astounding upside-down maneuver with which Maverick flaunts his daring and prowess early on isn’t a violation of rules, just a departure from textbook methods. On another flight, he does break the rules, in relatively minor ways—he goes briefly below the “hard deck” (the lower limit) to win a competition and then playfully buzzes officers in a tower—and gets seriously called on the carpet for it. By contrast, in the sequel Maverick openly defies the orders of his superior officers, and not merely for a quick maneuver or a playful twit—he steals two planes, and destroys one of them. (For that matter, the destruction is kept offscreen and is merely played for laughs.) The essence of “Maverick” is that a naval officer breaks the law but gets away with it, because he and he alone can save the country from imminent danger.

The lawbreaker-as-hero model rings differently in an age of Trumpian politics and practices, of open insurrection and a near-coup. “Maverick” is evidence, as strong as any in the political arena, that the Overton window of authoritarianism has shifted. This is apparent in the movie’s cavalier attitude toward the rule of law, even in the seemingly sacrosanct domain of military discipline. In the original “Top Gun,” Maverick and the other pilots are told, by the instructor Viper (Tom Skerritt), “Now, we don’t make policy here, gentlemen. Elected officials, civilians do that. We are the instruments of that policy.” (Yes, “gentlemen”—all the fliers in the original are men.) In “Maverick,” there is no parallel line of dialogue, and the military is hermetically sealed off from any reference to politics—perhaps because such sentiments would likely now, in many parts of the country, be booed.

In “Top Gun,” Maverick is a warrior who needs to master his emotions in order to serve his country and to protect his colleagues. In the new film, Maverick, nearing sixty, succeeds solely by giving in to his emotions, by expressly not controlling them—and this, above all, is the doctrine that he imparts to young pilots: “Don’t think, just do.” That mantra, which his best students repeat back to him and follow, is a strange perversion of a key phrase that the young Maverick, explaining himself in class, blurts out in “Top Gun”: “You don’t have time to think up there; if you think, you’re dead.” There’s a world of difference between the young Maverick’s nearly apologetic instrumentalizing of instinct and the elder Maverick’s exaltation of unthinking action. This key line—which, following the quotability of the original film, seems devised to become a catchphrase—isn’t limited to flying and fighting but is delivered as a dictum that could as easily be echoed by anyone with anything to do anywhere.

Thinking means reflecting on consequences and contexts, going past immediate desires and appearances to consider causes and implications. Not thinking is easy for the characters in “Maverick,” because they have no individual attributes at all. The pilots and the officers are played by a diverse group of actors, but the screenwriters give them identities outside of their military actions and no backstories beside the ones that issue from the original “Top Gun.” In the entire film, not a single event or idea or experience is discussed that doesn’t specifically relate to the plot. As a result, the stars and the supporting cast alike have little to do and are reduced to flattened emblems of themselves. Yet the reduction of the characters to cipher-like mechanical functions is part of the charm of “Maverick,” thrusting into the foreground the many extended sequences of high-risk flight, and rendering them more dramatically characterized than anything that takes place on the ground. Also, these airborne scenes far outshine the ones in “Top Gun,” because they are filmed largely from the point of view of the pilots, looking out through the front of the cockpit into the onrush of other planes and in the face of looming and menacing obstacles. They are some of the most impressive and exciting—and strikingly simple—action sequences that I’ve seen in a while.

Apparently, the flight scenes in “Maverick” were realized in actual planes in flight, and the cameras in the cockpits were wielded by the actors themselves. Cruise, who famously enjoys doing his own stunts, supposedly trained his castmates in the requisite skills of aerial cinematography. I wouldn’t have guessed any of this, though, if I hadn’t read the publicity materials in which Cruise and others say so. The scenes of pilots in flight are cut into rapid fragments that reduce aerial views to mere moments of excitement. They are interspersed with aggrandizing grunt-and-sweat closeups of the actors, especially Cruise. This amounts to a kind of malpractice in the editing room, transforming the actors’ brave and devoted exertions into a seeming cheat, an ersatz experience that might as well have been created with C.G.I.

What’s most impressive about “Top Gun: Maverick” is its speed—not the speed of the planes in flight but the speed with which the movie dashes in a straight line from its opening act to its conclusion. The flights at the center of the film are vertiginously twisty, but the drama is a bullet train on a rigid track. Both midair and on the ground, Kosinski is an approximator. He doesn’t let his eye get distracted by the piquant detail, and he doesn’t turn his head to overhear a stray confidence or an incidental remark. He’s narrowly focussed on the relentless course of the action, and incurious about its byways, its implications, its material or emotional realities. He keeps the drama as abstract as the military software and as inhuman as the military hardware that are the movie’s true protagonists. I repeat: I enjoyed it, and you might, too—if you don’t think, just watch.

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Following a two-year pandemic delay, Top Gun: Maverick  is finally arriving in theaters — and the wait has been well-worth it. Directed by Joseph Kosinski ( Tron: Legacy and Oblivion ), Maverick  harnesses everything that worked in Tony Scott's original movie and turns the volume up. The result is a film that simultaneously nods to nostalgia, honoring the Top Gun legacy (beloved characters and storylines, as well as admiration for the 1986 film itself), while blasting open the series mythology by introducing new heroes as well as modern blockbuster effects that deliver an emotionally rich and pulse-pounding ride. Arriving 26 years after the first film, Top Gun: Maverick is a rare sequel that is not only better than the original but retroactively makes Top Gun's story altogether deeper.

Set three decades after LT Pete "Maverick" Mitchell  (Tom Cruise) and LT Tom "Iceman" Kazansky (Val Kilmer) overcame their rivalry to save the SS Layton, Maverick sees the titular hero summoned back to the Naval Fighter Weapons School at Naval Air Station Miramar — aka Top Gun — to prepare a squad of talented but young fighter pilots for a highly-dangerous assault on a heavily-fortified uranium refinery. Maverick's unorthodox approach to teaching (along with his penchant for disobeying orders) puts him at odds, as usual, with his superiors (most notably Vice ADM "Cyclone," played by Jon Hamm). However, Maverick's biggest challenge isn't the upper brass or the mission ahead, it's navigating a complicated and tense relationship with LT Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw — a stick jockey chosen to train for the attack and the son of Maverick's former best friend LTJG Nick "Goose" Bradshaw (who died training with Maverick).

Related:  Top Gun: Maverick Character Posters Introduce The Pilots

Kosinski and Cruise have crafted a continuation that not only stands on its own, but also lends additional weight and meaning to the events of the original Top Gun . Building on Maverick's ongoing guilt, and how that guilt dovetails with Rooster's animosity (and subsequent) fears, the sequel transforms Goose's death in  Top Gun  from a character-defining incident into a film universe-defining pillar. Kosinski connects this through line with subtle and sensitive moments that lean on a talented stable of actors and unspoken sentiment — rather than heavy-handed dialogue — to remind audiences of past events and stoke current tensions.

Revisiting Maverick after two decades, Cruise injects new layers into his iconic cocky pilot, crafting an arc for the character that is, arguably, truer to Maverick than where Top Gun  actually left him. In the sequel, the titular hero may be older but he remains just as capable and Cruise weighs him down with regret rather than "too old for this" clichés that similar stories usually build on. Maverick's weakness this round isn't a reckless desire to be  seen as the best or arrogance in the face of authority (though, there is still a charming amount of the latter). Instead, he's confronted by a life of choices and avoidances that have left him with nothing beyond a love of flying, with no other option (to save his team and himself) than to slow slow down and embrace his vulnerability. Fortunately, the near-60-year-old Cruise has, in turn, become just as adept at conveying vulnerability as he was at projecting "cool" back in 1986.

Miles Teller is sharp in the role of Rooster. Initial interactions between Teller and Cruise are sparse and restrained but as the story progresses, there's plenty for the pair to unpack. Teller successfully channels the reserved and thoughtful nuance that defined Anthony Edwards' turn as Goose while injecting a dash of Maverick's spark into the junior Bradshaw. This creates a volatile mix that primes the Maverick story for rewarding family drama. The supporting cast is largely updated variations of the characters and dynamics that made Top Gun so memorable (and fun). While Maverick is initially introduced to a dozen trainees, the film quickly narrows its focus to the ones that will play a significant role in events as they unfold.

Standing out from the pack, Glen Powell relishes in an Iceman-like foil as LT "Hangman" Seresin to Teller's Rooster. Monica Barbaro steals scenes as the charming and clever LT "Phoenix" Trace, while Lewis Pullman is sure to be a favorite as LT "Bob" Floyd, an awkward and bookish squad member who gets several of the film's most amusing (and dry) moments of humor. Jennifer Connelly joins the franchise as Penelope "Penny" Benjamin and delivers as a fetching new (but old within the story) love interest for Cruise. Maverick fast-forwards past a lot of history between the two, but Connelly ensures that Penny is fleshed out enough to feel like a fitting counter-balance for Maverick (especially since Kelly McGillis' "Charlie" Blackwood is not included this round). Bashir Salahuddin's Coleman is a humorous, albeit also contemplative, addition as Maverick's right-hand in teaching his trainees, often played for understated comic relief. Lastly, Top Gun: Maverick finds a clever and rewarding way to incorporate  Val Kilmer as Iceman , in spite of the actor's reduced ability to speak due to his battle with throat cancer, and fans will, without question, enjoy seeing how the Iceman/Maverick friendship has evolved over time.

No doubt, Kosinski and Cruise knew they'd need to up the ante with eye-popping aerial battles — and Maverick delivers. Combining practical cockpit footage with well-placed (and sparingly used) effects shots, the Top Gun sequel has crafted one of, if not the , most exciting dog fights ever captured on film. The film's other pulse-pounding set pieces ensure all that quality character drama is met with equally memorable action.  Top Gun: Maverick  is playing in IMAX theaters and the added cost is absolutely worth an upgraded ticket. And while premium viewings aren't essential, high-quality sound and screen space definitely heighten already thrilling set pieces.

Top Gun: Maverick borrows a lot of from its predecessor and while audiences may find a few aspects to hue too closely to the original, the film manages to thread an incredibly difficult set of challenges. Maverick himself is familiar and wisened but with room to grow and Rooster challenges the aging pilot with a fresh dilemma that makes the events of Top Gun  all the more heartbreaking. And it's all framed within an exciting mission and high-flying action. Fans waited three decades for Maverick to return and, thanks to an all-around great expansion of the series, its mythology and characters (not to mention eye-popping battles), it's easy to imagine that moviegoers won't be as patient if they have to wait another 30 years for Cruise to climb back into the cockpit.

NEXT:  Top Gun: Maverick Trailer

Top Gun: Maverick  releases in theaters on May 27. The film is 131 minutes long and rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action, and some strong language.

Top Gun: Maverick

Top Gun: Maverick is the sequel to the 1986 original film starring Tom Cruise as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, a top-tier pilot in the Navy. Thirty years after the original film's events, Maverick is asked to head up a section of the TOP GUN program to embark on a dangerous mission. Things become personal when the program includes the son of Maverick's late friend, forcing him to confront his past.

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In many ways, Maverick’s ( Tom Cruise ) story in 1986’s Top Gun feels like a story told with the hindsight of an older man reflecting on the foolishness of his youth. The original Top Gun is two hours of machismo, sweaty showoffs, and toxic personalities, centered around a careless character who eventually learns the dangers of his cockiness and shenanigans. Top Gun is the kind of story that one could imagine an older character sharing with the younger generation, a cautionary tale about how life isn’t all hot dogging in planes, oiled-up volleyball, and Kenny Loggins songs. It’s not hard to imagine an older Maverick telling people that he used to be a real piece of shit.

Maverick made choices back in his 20s, choices that still have reverberations to this day, that haunt him, that inform his decisions almost forty years later. With Top Gun , we saw Maverick as a selfish character who put himself before everyone else, and while he still lives up to his name, now, he’s more interested in what’s best for the group as opposed to what’s best for him. In Top Gun: Maverick , the staggeringly great sequel from director Joseph Kosinski ( Oblivion , TRON: Legacy ), Maverick has been living in the shadow of the choices that younger Maverick made, and now, 36 years later, this character is back, ready to confront the danger zone of a past that has haunted him since the first film.

The changes in Maverick are apparent from the very first action sequence. The former hotshot pilot is trying to prove that he can take a plane to Mach 10 in order to prove that a plane with a living, breathing person behind it is more effective than an unmanned drone. The Maverick we last saw in Top Gun would’ve attempted this feat simply to boost his own ego, an attempt to prove that he’s the greatest pilot in the world. Yet in this sequence, Kosinski shows us that this isn’t his focus anymore, but rather, if he succeeds, it’ll be better for his team, who will likely lose their jobs if he fails. This selflessness is a completely different Maverick than the character we’ve seen before.

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But that doesn’t mean Maverick doesn’t still have the same daring and desire to push his boundaries. It’s this type of attitude that has left him at his current captain’s rank. As Vice Admiral “Cyclone” ( Jon Hamm ) tells Maverick, he can’t get promoted, he won’t retire, and he refuses to die. At the end of Top Gun , Maverick wanted to be a teacher, but after two months in the classroom thirty years ago, Maverick also couldn’t maintain that position. But Admiral Cyclone gives Maverick a choice: either he trains a group of Top Gun graduates for a highly-specialized mission, or Maverick will never fly again for the Navy. Maverick agrees, and heads back to Top Gun, where he trains an elite team of pilots, including the cocky Hangman ( Glen Powell ) and Rooster ( Miles Teller ), the son of Maverick’s late best friend, Goose.

As Maverick trains Hangman, Rooster, and the rest of these Top Gun graduates, Top Gun: Maverick finds a way to pay homage to the iconic moments of Top Gun , but in a way that doesn’t feel frivolous and serves a purpose in this new, more urgent story. For example, the sun-drenched beachside game this time around is used as a team-building tool, whereas this new gang getting together and singing at a bar leads to one of the film’s surprisingly emotional moments—of which there are several. Maverick finds a way to pay tribute to the past, but in a way that builds upon the film we know and adds weight to these moments.

Similarly, with Cruise returning as Maverick, Top Gun: Maverick feels like a character and an actor reliving their glory days in the most joyous way possible. Through Maverick, Cruise gets to explore one of his most infamous characters, but in a way that now has a significant amount of emotional heft. As Maverick, we get a reminder of just how many things Cruise does extremely well as an actor, and in some of these aspects, we’re seeing parts of Cruise in this role that we haven’t seen in years. Of course, Top Gun: Maverick allows Cruise to show that he remains one of the greatest living action stars, who—like Maverick—is willing to push his limitations to their breaking point. But Maverick also shows Cruise’s gifts at playing a compelling leading man, an effective romantic lead—alongside an equally wonderful Jennifer Connelly —a comedian with excellent timing, and an actor who can really make a film’s emotional moments sing.

Maverick , with its screenplay by Ehren Kruger , Eric Warren Singer , and Christopher McQuarrie , knows how to tap into that nostalgia for the original and find the emotional moments that would hit Maverick’s character hard, and Cruise plays these scenes with grace and power. There’s a clear love that Cruise, Kosinski, and this team of writers have for these characters and this story, and thanks in large part to Cruise’s performance, this love really shines through, especially in scenes where Maverick has to explore his past and the decisions that led him to where he is today.

The growth that this film shows over the original is arguably at its clearest with the new squad of pilots. Of course, there's still the arrogant pilot who thinks he's the best in Powell's Hangman, but especially with Teller's Rooster, we're seeing a character like Maverick, who is haunted by the legacy of this father and with something to prove, but without the smugness and pride. Through Teller's performance, we can see the weight of Maverick's past in human form, the pain he's caused, and the wrongs he wishes he could right, and some of Maverick 's best scenes involve Rooster and Maverick having to reckon with this difficult past. It's also exciting to see a new crew with more diversity and more character than we're genuinely excited to spend time with.

Kosinski does all this in what also is likely to be the best action film of 2022, a tense and continuously exciting epic that knows exactly how to escalate the tension of every impressive action sequence. Top Gun: Maverick might contain some of the best plane scenes in the history of film, and soars over the stunts of the original. This is the type of white-knuckle, awe-inducing action film that deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible, with an audience stuck at the edge of their seats. Yet again, Top Gun: Maverick doesn’t include action for action's sake, each remarkable action sequence serves a narrative purpose, and expands what we know about these characters when they are in their element in the skies.

When talking about Top Gun: Maverick , it’s hard not to sound hyperbolic, but this is the rare case where it absolutely deserves all the massive praise. Top Gun: Maverick improves upon the original in every conceivable way (well, the soundtrack doesn’t have Berlin, so that’s one strike against it), and does so in a way that might make this one of the greatest sequels ever made. It’s also hard not to say this might have some of the most exciting action scenes to ever hit the skies, and gives Cruise one of his best performances by returning to the role that made him a star. Top Gun: Maverick is a marvel of a film, one that will truly take your breath away.

Top Gun: Maverick opens in theaters on May 27.

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'Top Gun: Maverick' is ridiculous. It's also ridiculously entertaining

Justin Chang

Tom Cruise is back as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick. Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures Corporation hide caption

Tom Cruise is back as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick.

In one of the more memorable lines in the original Top Gun , Maverick gets chewed out by a superior who tells him, "Son, your ego's writing checks your body can't cash."

Sometimes I wonder if Tom Cruise took that putdown as a personal challenge. No movie star seems to work harder or push himself further than Cruise these days. He just keeps going and going, whether he's scaling skyscrapers in a new Mission: Impossible adventure or showing a bunch of fresh-faced pilots how it's done in the ridiculous and ridiculously entertaining Top Gun: Maverick .

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Cruise was in his early 20s when he first played Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, the cocky young Navy pilot with the aviator sunglasses, the Kawasaki motorcycle and the need for speed. In the sequel, he's as arrogant and insubordinate as ever: Now a Navy test pilot in his late 50s, Maverick still knows how to tick off his superiors, as we see in an exciting opening sequence where he pushes a new plane beyond its limits. Partly as punishment, he's ordered to return to TOPGUN, the elite pilot-training school, and train its best and brightest for an impossibly dangerous new mission.

One of his trainees is a hotheaded young pilot called Rooster, played by Miles Teller. Rooster is the son of Maverick's beloved wingman, Goose, who tragically died while flying with Maverick in the first Top Gun . Maverick's lingering guilt over Goose's death affects his relationship with Rooster; so does his desire to protect Rooster from harm, which generates some suspense over whether he'll end up choosing the young man for the assignment.

And so the three screenwriters of Top Gun: Maverick — including Cruise's regular Mission: Impossible writer-director, Christopher McQuarrie — have taken the threads of the original and spun them into an intergenerational male weepie, a dad movie of truly epic proportions. They're tapping into nostalgia for the original, while aiming for new levels of emotional grandeur. To that end, the soundtrack features a Lady Gaga song, "Hold My Hand." It's nowhere near as iconic a chart topper as the original movie's "Take My Breath Away," but tugs at your heartstrings nonetheless.

Much of the plot is unabashedly derivative of the first Top Gun . Once again, Maverick runs afoul of growling authority figures, here played by Ed Harris and Jon Hamm . Cruise's former co-star Kelly McGillis is nowhere to be seen, but Maverick does get another perfunctory love interest, a bartender named Penny, nicely played by Jennifer Connelly despite the thanklessness of the role.

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Lady gaga, 'hold my hand'.

What's interesting about Top Gun: Maverick is how it isn't like its predecessor, mostly in terms of style. The first Top Gun , directed on a relatively low budget by the late Tony Scott , combined the aesthetics of a military recruitment video with some of the ripest homoerotic imagery ever seen in a major Hollywood movie. For better or worse, the sequel, directed by Joseph Kosinski of Tron: Legacy and Oblivion , is a much tamer, slicker, classier affair. Maverick no longer struts around in towels and tighty-whities, though he can still fly a plane like nobody's business.

The action sequences are much more thrilling and immersive than in the original. You feel like you're really in the cockpit with these pilots, and that's because you are: The actors underwent intense flight training and flew actual planes during shooting. In that respect, Top Gun: Maverick feels like a throwback to a lost era of practical moviemaking, before computer-generated visual effects took over Hollywood. You start to understand why Cruise, the creative force behind the movie, was so driven to make it: In telling a story where older and younger pilots butt heads, and state-of-the-art F-18s duke it out with rusty old F-14s, he's trying to show us that there's room for the old and the new to coexist. He's also advancing a case for the enduring appeal of the movies and their power to transport us with viscerally gripping action and big, sweeping emotions.

Which brings us to the movie's most powerful scene, in which Val Kilmer briefly reprises his role as Iceman, Maverick's former nemesis-turned-friend. Kilmer is, in some respects, Cruise's opposite: a onetime star whose career never quite found its groove, and who's been beset by health issues in recent years, including the loss of his voice due to throat cancer. His soulful presence here gives this high-flying melodrama the grounding it needs. Cruise may be this movie's immortal star, but it's Kilmer's aching performance that takes your breath away.

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Top Gun: Maverick

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In Theaters

• May 24, 2022
• Tom Cruise as Maverick; Jennifer Connelly as Penny Benjamin; Miles Teller as Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw; Monica Barbaro as Phoenix; Val Kilmer as Iceman; Glen Powell as Hangman; Jon Hamm as Cyclone

Home Release Date

• August 23, 2022
• Joseph Kosinski

Distributor

• Paramount Pictures

Movie Review

After 30 years in service, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is still a captain in the U.S. Navy. A highly decorated and honored captain, but a captain, nonetheless.

Now you might suggest that he’s been passed over for promotion because, well, he’s as obstinate and troublemaking as his callsign would suggest.

And yep, that would be as true as the sky is high.

If, however, you ask Maverick himself, he’d probably admit that his lack of rank upgrades afforded him one special perk: It kept him flying. He held promotions and subsequent desk work at bay and kept his backside in a cockpit. And that’s where he feels most like himself.

Of course, his attitude and varied choices haven’t necessarily earned him many friends among the higher ranks. They’d rather see him pack his reckless, order-ignoring ways into a small bag and leave their view as soon as possible.

His sort tends to cause problems. 

But unfortunately (from a commanding officer’s perspective) his sort tends to get results, too. And they need him for one more important mission dealing with … his sorts.

Maverick is ordered back to the Top Gun program he left scores of years before, a program designed to train the cream-of-the-crop US Navy pilots. There, he’ll have a mere three weeks to teach a group of crackerjacks to take on what amounts to an impossible mission. How impossible? Flying-through-a-narrow-winding-canyon-at-Mach-speed-while-100-feet-off-the-ground-then-up-over-a-mountain-to-hit-a-target-a-few-feet-wide impossible.

Maverick has no desire to do any such thing. He’d much rather stick with his job as a test pilot, pushing a plane up to Mach 10 or 11.

But here’s another thing about staying a captain for 30 years: Admirals don’t give a hoot about your desires. “You fly for Top Gun, or you don’t fly again,” his new commanding officer tells him.  

So, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is back on familiar turf. He’ll do what it takes to get these young hot shots up to speed.

And it won’t be a laidback trip.

Positive Elements

One of the young pilots in Maverick’s group, Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw is the son of his former co-pilot, Goose. And because of that history—and Maverick’s part in Goose’s accidental death—things are pretty tense between Rooster and Maverick. But a large part of this film is dedicated to Maverick not only earning Rooster’s respect but turning the whole self-focused group of pilots into a team that would sacrifice anything for the man (or woman) next to them. Several of these pilots do just that. Heroics abound.

Later, we find out that Maverick’s connection to Rooster was almost parental in his mind—trying to see the young man’s mother’s wishes through and keep him safe from harm. “I was trying to be the father he lost.”

When back into the Top Gun fold, Maverick reconnects with an old flame named Penny, who owns and runs the local bar. The two of them grow closer. And in light of the changing things in his life, Maverick declares that he wants to make things more long-term with Penny. Penny’s young daughter pointedly tells him, “Just don’t break her heart again.”

Spiritual Elements

After saving his fellow pilot’s lives, a guy joking radios them to say, “Good afternoon gentlemen, this is your savior speaking.”

Sexual Content

Harkening back to the original Top Gun movie, the group of pilots all play football while shirtless and sweaty. (The single female pilot in the group wears a tank top.) We also see Maverick among that bare-skin crew, and he goes shirtless another time while running on a treadmill.

Maverick and Penny hug and kiss. The camera cuts away, implying further intimacy. The next scene features Maverick with his shirt off and Penny in a kimono in her bed.

Violent Content

As you might imagine, there is a lot of peril mixed into this action adventure. All of the pilots here risk life and limb with daredevil flying at Mach speed as they prepare for the mission on hand and engage in dogfights with an enemy force of high-tech jets. (The live-action- and CGI-blended dogfight battles are shot meticulously and are very realistic looking.)

Planes and helicopters get shot down in balls of flame by jets and surface-to-air missiles. We see one jet crash after being hit by a flock of birds and catching on fire. A jet traveling at Mach 10 begins to fall apart and then self-destructs at altitude.

During a flashback, Maverick remembers his friend, Goose’s, death from 35 years before. Maverick tries to aid a bleeding Goose after their plane crashes in the ocean.

A pilot passes out from the force of a high-G maneuver and almost crashes his jet. A military helicopter takes aim at a pilot running on the ground, ripping the scenery up with its high-caliber weapons. An underground nuclear plant explodes.

Crude or Profane Language

One f-word and 20 s-words are joined by uses of “b–ch,” “h—” and “a–.” We hear one use of “d–khead.” Jesus’ name is misused once and God’s name twice (once in combination with “d—n”).

Someone uses an offensive hand gesture.

Drug and Alcohol Content

We see lots of locals and pilots drinking beer at Penny’s bar on several occasions.

Other Negative Elements

A commanding officer makes it clear to Maverick that he isn’t as concerned about who dies during the mission on hand as he is that the job is accomplished. “Every mission has its risks. These pilots accept that,” the officer states. “I don’t, sir,” Maverick replies.

Maverick defies orders twice in the course of the story. But in each case, his choice is designed to help others under his command.

After 35 years and some four release date pushbacks (thanks to COVID lockdowns) you might have an inkling that Top Gun: Maverick isn’t going to exactly ignite your metaphorical afterburners. But in fact, this is an almost picture-perfect sequel to its iconic ’80s predecessor.

Viewers get lots of callbacks to the original pic here, including familiar music riffs, a surprisingly young-looking Tom Cruise racing on a motorcycle and sweaty shirtless pilots playing ball on the beach.

Then there’s the afterburner-ignited action, incredibly filmed dogfights, and a dash of lightly sensual romance. The only real hard-deck issue with this pic is the occasional salty language coming from its new crop of flyboys and one flygirl. It’s probably not as bad as it could have been. But that concern is likely still strong enough to keep younger wannabe pilots grounded.

Oh, and there’s one other problem I can personally guarantee will pop up on your post-filmgoing radar: When heading home from the theater you will drive too fast.

Sorry, it’s gonna happen.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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‘top gun: maverick’ review: the perfect summer movie.

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Now that’s how you do a 1980s film sequel.

Walking into “Top Gun: Maverick,” starring Tom Cruise, viewers violently shake with nervousness that they might witness a nightmarish repeat of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” — all their favorite ‘80s stars and characters reunited after decades, wasted, embarrassed and chasing after aliens.

Then the movie starts. All it takes is the opening scene of Cruise as Maverick pushing a plane’s limits to a daunting Mach 10 while “Highway to the Danger Zone” plays to realize that this is a worthy, often exemplary follow-up to the 1986 classic. It’s everything a summer movie should be.

TOP GUN: MAVERICK

Running time: 131 minutes. Rated PG-13 (sequences of intense action, and some strong language). In theaters May 27.

The director, Joseph Kosinski, and writers Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie don’t get overly clever with Maverick’s story. He’s not a washed-up insurance salesman now who needs a training montage to get back in shape, and there are no meta inside jokes about the old film. 

Still a captain in the Navy, Maverick is called back to Top Gun — where the nation’s best pilots are trained — to prepare a group of hotshots for a dangerous overseas mission to destroy a uranium plant in a mountain.

We’re never told which country is making nukes, probably because Paramount does not enjoy its films getting banned from overseas markets.

Returning to Top Gun is an emotional minefield for Maverick. One of the young flyers is Rooster (Miles Teller), the son of his late pal Goose. (Don’t worry, Anthony Edwards doesn’t play a ghost.) Mav wrestles with allowing Rooster to fly at all, which will put him in danger of his dad’s fate.

The other lieutenants all have big “Breakfast Club” personalities and those goofy callsigns: Hangman (Glen Powell), the jerk; Phoenix (Monica Barbaro), the powerful woman who has to put up with dudely nonsense; Coyote (Greg Tarzan Davis); Fanboy (Danny Ramirez); Payback (Jay Ellis); and geeky Bob (Lewis Pullman). Them and their uninformed compatriots compete for six coveted mission slots.

Providing some villainy is Jon Hamm as Cyclone — a cold, by-the-book vice admiral who is skeptical of Maverick’s unorthodox and life-threatening teaching style. Mav, you see, is like Whoopi Goldberg in “Sister Act,” if singing a song could get you blown to smithereens.

Maverick also has a new/old romance with bar owner Penny (Jennifer Connelly), whom he had a fling with sometime after his relationship with Kelly McGillis’ Charlie ended. Pushing 60, Mav wants his personal life — if not his planes — to slow down.

The teariest complication is Iceman, still played by Val Kilmer — who in real life has suffered from throat cancer and has difficulty speaking. Whatever animosity there was between Mav and Ice has melted, and their camaraderie is deeply moving. You’ll be glad Kilmer agreed to make the movie.

And then, of course, there’s Cruise. Despite the man’s consistently strange personal life, no action star working today demands the quality that Cruise demands. He is in peak form here in every respect, and the actors around him rise to his challenge. 

There is a fun scene on the beach in which Maverick has the oft-argumentative Top Gun flyers bond by playing football. Music plays, sun shines, water splashes. Naturally, everybody is shirtless, including Cruise. And, for a moment, the veteran actor blends in perfectly with these ripped, sexy 20somethings. 

The man is turning 60 in July. Really takes your breath away.

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Common sense media reviewers.

'90s Western offers a few laughs and so-so adventure.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Most bad behavior is punished. The movie makes fun

The leading female character is portrayed as indep

Mostly light-hearted jeopardy and action including

A few passionate kisses culminating in a scene pla

Infrequent, mild profanity, including "piss,&

Occasional background drinking in bar. Suggested d

Parents need to know that this movie's sole purpose is to be entertaining. It's filled with old-time Western action, but it's played for fun here. There are lots of fistfights, shootings, steely-eyed bad guys, coiled hissing snakes, and even a literal "cliffhanger" (one character hangs over a…

Positive Messages

Most bad behavior is punished. The movie makes fun of the usual caricatures and heavy-handed treatment of Native Americans in other Westerns. Cleverness and smarts are shown to defeat brute strength, greed, and destructive behavior. Some con artists are treated as jovial and benign, conning only those who are looking for an edge and not always honest themselves.

Positive Role Models

The leading female character is portrayed as independent, capable, and smart, though often dishonest. The heroes are con artists, bluffers, and rogues, though good men, honest, and loyal at heart.

Violence & Scariness

Mostly light-hearted jeopardy and action including extended sequence on runaway stagecoach; barroom brawls; man prepped for hanging with snakes hissing at his feet; explosion during a bank robbery; fight on the edge of a cliff; casino shoot-out. Some deaths occur during gunplay, but there's no blood and none of the scenes focus on bodies or injuries.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A few passionate kisses culminating in a scene played for humor in which there's suggested off-camera sexual activity; we see a bare male chest along with bare female shoulders. Some sexual innuendo, including one reference to penis size that should go over the heads of most kids.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Infrequent, mild profanity, including "piss," "s--t," "bastards," "whorehouse," "asshole,""son of a bitch,""damn," "jackass," "hell."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Occasional background drinking in bar. Suggested drunkenness in one scene. Some cigar smoking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this movie's sole purpose is to be entertaining. It's filled with old-time Western action, but it's played for fun here. There are lots of fistfights, shootings, steely-eyed bad guys, coiled hissing snakes, and even a literal "cliffhanger" (one character hangs over a steep gorge for what seems like forever). Occasionally someone dies, but the object here is to keep real violence to a minimum and overstate the battles for humorous effect. There are sexual innuendos, some passionate kissing, a bare chest (male) and a bare shoulder (female), and some cigar smoking. The Native Americans wear war paint, howl, and shake their fists at the sky, but it's delivered to parody the stereotypes that show up in other Westerns. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (5)
• Kids say (5)

Based on 5 parent reviews

This movie is absolutely brilliant, all families will love and enjoy! Innuendos are little to none.

Fun, but not harmless., what's the story.

Bret Maverick, a very popular television character from the 1950s and 1960s, is brought to life again by Mel Gibson in this comic adventure made decades later. Maverick is a consummate gambler, a world-class romantic hero, and a natural born master of the one-liner. He's on his way to a high-stakes poker tournament where he hopes to win the big money and cement his reputation as the best poker player on the continent. Still $3000 short of the entrance fee, he's hoping to collect some outstanding debts and enjoy the journey. Instead, he encounters two rivals for the poker title (including the elegant and unscrupulous Annabelle Bransford, played by Jodie Foster ), a mysterious lawman ( James Garner , who was the original TV Maverick ), and various baddies (including Alfred Molina and James Coburn ) who seem hell-bent on his not finishing the trip. After a series of hair-raising adventures and near-death experiences, Maverick arrives on the paddle-steamer where the tournament is to be held, only to be met by even more danger and duplicity.

Is It Any Good?

An amusing script by William Goldman, slick direction, and charming (if not to be taken seriously) performances by the principals provide some fun, thrills, and clever plot twists. The filmmakers pay homage to the Western genre by using a number of classic Western character actors to good advantage in some of the smaller roles. And the scenes with Graham Greene and his band of Native American warriors are the funniest and most thought-provoking. At over two hours, however, there aren't quite enough laughs, inspired adventures, or mind-bending story elements to put it in a class with the great caper films.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how this movie is a different type of Western. What are some of the things that show us that this isn't an actual portrayal of the Old West, but a humorous and fond look backwards?

What does the movie say about appearance versus reality? Which people pretend to be one thing but are really something else? Which people have surprising secrets?

What do you think the filmmakers are hoping you'll understand about movie stereotyping?

Movie Details

• In theaters : May 20, 1994
• On DVD or streaming : June 1, 2004
• Cast : James Garner , Jodie Foster , Mel Gibson
• Director : Richard Donner
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Warner Home Video
• Genre : Comedy
• Run time : 127 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG
• MPAA explanation : mild sensuality, language, and some western action
• Last updated : June 21, 2023

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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