the times | Friday May 27 2022 V2 7Ed Potton
gets to know Her Majesty p8
Will Hodgkinson
on a resurgent Liam Gallagher p10
Carol Midgley
admires Big Boys p15
THE
CRITICS
eyebrows in 2022, the treatment of
women may. Stripped, slapped,
subjected to awkward phone sex
(“I want to stroke you and kiss you all
over”), drowned in a submerged car —
Britt Ekland, Geraldine Moffat and
their fellow actresses don’t fare well.
That’s kind of the point, though. These
are not pleasant men, despite the
repartee and sharp suits.
Ed Potton
New 4K restoration in cinemas, in
ultra-HD on Blu-ray from July 25“You’re a big man but you’re in bad
shape.” “Because I know you wear
purple underwear.” Has Michael Caine
been cooler or more quotable than he
is as the London gangster investigating
his brother’s death in Newcastle? Even
naked he totes a shotgun with elan.
Dismissed by many on release, Mike
Hodges’s film was championed in the
Nineties by Quentin Tarantino and
Guy Ritchie, who filled their films with
stylish brutality and pithy psychos.
While the violence won’t raisethe big film
SPLASH NEWSclassic
film
of the
we ek
Get Carter (1971)
18, 111min
{{{{(Michael Caine as the gangster CarterJennifer Connelly as Penny Benjamin and Tom Cruise as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun: MaverickSee the thrilling
new Top Gun on
the biggest screen
possible — then
watch it again,
says Kevin Maher
Come fly with Tom. You won’t regret it
‘T
rust your instincts.
Don’t think. Just
do.” That’s the
new mantra of
the legendary
fighter pilot Pete
“Maverick”
Mitchell (Tom
Cruise) in this belated and glorious
sequel to the Eighties blockbuster that
made Cruise a megastar and defined
an era of Hollywood film-making:
remember high concepts, elevator
pitches and visual excess? Maverick
still feels the need, the need for speed,
but he’s a less cocksure creature this
time round. Instead, as an ageing test
pilot who’s confined to a cavernous
hangar — plastered with original Top
Gun photographic memorabilia — in
the Mojave desert, he is someone
who projects the weather-beaten
energy of an elder statesman of action
(Cruise will be 60 in July).
“The future is coming and you’re
not in it!” is another monumental line,
barked early on by Maverick’s
superior, Rear Admiral Chester Cain
(Ed Harris), while he is waxing
lyrical about the superiority of
military combat drones over
antiquated bike-riding, rule-breaking,
Ray-Ban-wearing flyboys and flygirls
(yes, there are female pilots too).
If only there was some way that Mav
could prove Cain wrong and embark
on a breathtaking adventure that
would return him to the US navy’s
Top Gun fighter school in San Diego,
in a mentor capacity, to guide a
plethora of swaggering recruits on
a needlessly convoluted mission to
bomb an underground uranium
enrichment plant in an unnamed“enemy” country (it’s snowy and the
planes are Russian Su-57 fighters).
OK, the plot was never the thing
with Top Gun. The three credited
screenwriters, including the regular
Cruise collaborator Christopher
McQuarrie (director of the two most
recent Mission Impossible films), have
honoured that loose’n’easy tradition
without it ever feeling crass or
hackneyed — this isn’t Ghostbusters:
Afterlife. And yes, the bombing
narrative — with trench run and
targeted exhaust port — is lifted
wholly from Star Wars, but that’s verymeta: the original 1980s pitch for
Top Gun was: “Star Wars on Earth!”
What’s more impressive is how
McQuarrie, producer-star Cruise and
director Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion)
have excavated genuine emotion from
the material. There is, inevitably,
much attention paid to the guilt that
Maverick holds over the death of his
buddy Goose (Anthony Edwards) and
to the paternal feelings he harbours
for the star recruit and son of Goose,
Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles
Teller). In the right hands Teller can
produce firecracker performances(Whiplash, The Spectacular Now),
and here it’s his seething depiction
of resentment (Rooster blames
Maverick for his father’s death) that
injects dramatic voltage into his
scenes with Cruise.
The megastar, meanwhile, brings
his own personal history to the role,
and to the movie, with great effect.
There’s an elegiac note to his
performance (it’s subtle, but it’s there)
that suggests a character staring back
over 36 years of action theatrics and
not being especially enamoured of it.
When cameo co-star Val Kilmer
(playing Iceman again, but now a navy
commander) encourages Maverick to
“let go” of his old ways and patterns,
Cruise’s eyes fill with tears and he
sighs, “I don’t know how.” It’s
impossible, at that moment, not to
feel an eerie blur between character
and actor and not to be moved,
however modestly, by the notion of
a multimillionaire movie icon
imprisoned within his own legend
(there were audible sniffles of sadness
at my screening).
But no one, obviously, watches a
Top Gun movie for the tears (although
bring a hankie), and the spectacle
here has gone stratospheric. With
cameras inside cockpits and strapped
to wings and nose cones, Kosinski
has effortlessly outdone the
groundbreaking-for-the-time
aerobatic sequences from the first film.
Whereas simply conveying the flight
and speed of the jets was the goal of
Tony Scott’s original, Kosinski has
applied sophisticated film-making
grammar (establishing wide shots,
close-ups, reverse shots, cutaways) to
what are essentially mid-air chase
sequences. The results are often
breathtaking, and were achieved by
culling only the “best bits” from an
alarming 800 hours of footage,
which is more than all three of The
Lord of the Rings movies combined.
Even more impressive are the
moments when Kosinski’s camera
pulls back, far back and high up, from
somewhere seemingly above the
mesosphere, to deliver a godlike view
of the aerial antics. It’s smart,
vertiginous, pulse-quickening cinema.
See it on the biggest screen possible.
Then see it again.
In cinemasTop Gun:
Maverick
12A, 131min
{{{{(