Top Gun: Maverick - Big Dumb Fun Designed to Make IMAX Great Again
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B+
People who experienced the then-new technology of IMAX in the late ‘70s-‘80s, might remember those gimmicky, mind-bending, three-storey high short films that showcased the medium.
Story? What story? What they were about was flying or falling, and you vicariously experiencing both – a p.o.v. of hang-gliding or bungee jumping, or plummeting the downside of a monster roller coaster.
I hadn’t thought about proto-IMAX much in recent years. That is, until I saw an IMAX screening of Top Gun: Maverick, as narratively economical a piece of big dumb fun as I’ve seen in ages (possibly since 1986 when I saw the original).
Tom Cruise feels the need for speed all over again.
Clocking in at under two hours, virtually every word of prosaic bro dialogue, every dramatic exchange, every turn of events, is designed to do one thing: get us back in the sky twisting and turning at several times the speed of sound, narrowly avoiding crashes with other planes and with the ground.
I mean, the movie literally starts at Mach 10 – or rather, at the rogue attempt by over-the-hill fighter pilot Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) to push an experimental fighter past that speed.
Of course, it’s not as much fun if you’re not disobeying orders while you’re doing it – which is where the Rear Admiral in charge (Ed Harris) comes in. He furiously warns Maverick that his days will soon be over, and that mechanically piloted fighter planes will replace him and his incorrigible kind.
Much has been made of this exchange as a metaphor for Cruise’s own tenuous hold on the title of movie star (or “Hollywood’s last real movie star” as the New York Times would have it). Nearing 60, Cruise is still out there, trading on his swagger. Yes, to an extent it’s with characters that are already familiar to the audience (Mission Impossible’s Ethan Hunt, Jack Reacher, Maverick). But he also continues to try new things, some ill-fated (The Mummy), some arguably great if underappreciated (Edge of Tomorrow).
But whereas someone like Michael Bay will take as basic a scenario as robots fighting and stretch it to three hours to make it seem important, Cruise and veteran action producer Jerry Bruckheimer are clearly of the “Keep it simple, stupid,” school of giving the audience what they want.
What does the audience want? Real action and a break from CGI (Okay, that’s me talking, but those are real planes flying). They love seeing Cruise thumb his nose at “The Man.” After Harris’s character leaves the scene, Jon Hamm as Vice Admiral Beau “Cyclone” Simpson, becomes the new target of Maverick’s cocky insolence. Apparently, you are never too old to have a macho nickname, although I have yet to earn one, dammit.
And they love seeing old guys “school” overconfident young people. The straightforward plot has the disgraced test pilot being given the last-chance job of training a new class of Top Gun pilots to undertake a near-suicide mission. Said mission involves bombing the nuclear facility of an enemy nation that possesses more advanced fighter jets. (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie so coy about identifying who the enemy is. You never see their faces, and even the lettering on their planes and console panels is blurred. It makes me feel better to think of them as Russians.)
The newbies, badly in need of dogfight training, include Hangman (Glen Powell), an ego-driven braggart meant to evoke Val Kilmer’s original Iceman, Coyote (Greg Tarzan Davis), two tough women pilots, Halo (Kara Wang) and Phoenix (Monica Barbaro) and a problematic young stud named Rooster (Miles Teller).
Rooster is an issue because he’s the son of Goose (Anthony Edwards), Maverick’s long-ago wingman who met a bad end. There’s bad blood between Maverick and Rooster, which will all be explained and resolved between sonic booms.
As with the original, there is a love story (the ageless Jennifer Connelly runs the base bar). And the movie gets extra points for the respectful way it brings the ailing Kilmer into the film as the ailing Iceman, now Maverick’s protector and a fleet admiral.
The sophomoric dialogue and story will never win an Oscar, but they were never meant to. What’s important is how deep an impression your fingernails left on the theatre-seat armrest.
Top Gun: Maverick. Directed by Joseph Kosinski. Starring Tom Cruise, Jennifer Connelly, Miles Teller. In theatres Friday, May 27.