15
EZTHE
WASHINGTON
POST
.
FRIDAY,MAY
27, 2022
KWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Tom Cruise as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, Glen Powell as “Hangman,” Miles Teller as Bradley “Rooster”
haw and Monica Barbaro as “Phoenix”; Jay Ellis as “Payback”; Jon Hamm as Adm. Beau “Cyclone” Simpson; Jennifer Connelly as
ner Penny Benjamin alongside C ruise; and Barbaro, part of a terrific ensemble playing the young pilots in “Top Gun: Maverick.”
Bradley’s call sign is Rooster, which we learn in a
raucous barroom scene introducing the brand-new
batch of swaggering stick jockeys; they have call
signs like Coyote, Fanboy and Omaha, but they
might as well be Callback, Easter Egg and Reference
in a movie brimming with all three. In less skilled
hands, such constant nods to the past would feel
pandering and lazy. But Cruise has enlisted his own
crack team to turn an otherwise ho-hum retread into
a handsome, occasionally funny and smartly self-
aware exercise in escapism that in many ways
outperforms the classic it’s sequelizing.
For one thing, Pete himself has become a far more
interesting protagonist, losing the cocky air of
petulance and impunity and mellowing into a man
with some miles on him. He’s still being dressed
down by superiors (played with note-perfect gruff-
ness by Ed Harris and Jon Hamm), and they still can’t
resist his charms, ending nearly every argument by
gazing at him with adoration. (“He’s the fastest man
alive,” one of them murmurs.) “Top Gun: Maverick”
hews to the structure of the first movie, punctuating
scenes of rivalry, seduction and personal reckonings
with increasingly difficult flight tests and simulated
dogfights, the whole thing culminating in a genuine-
ly spectacular, climactic real-time battle.Let’s be honest: The 1986 film, directed by Tony
Scott from a script by Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr., was
corny to the point of camp. (That slo-mo volleyball
game, played by bronzed and shirtless flyboys, still
reigns supreme as the most hilariously homoerotic
scene of 20th-century cinema.) In the hands of
director Joseph Kosinski, working with a screenplay
by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Christo-
pher McQuarrie (from a story by Peter Craig and
Justin Marks), the testosterone and fetishistic pos-
turing have been toned down, sacrificing nothing by
way of shamelessly indulgent entertainment value.
So: The volleyball scene is now a football game —
shirtless in some cases, but also including a female
pilot (call sign Phoenix, played by Monica Barbaro),
and one in which Cruise’s character holds his own
with the buff newbies before gracefully retiring to
the sidelines. Kosinski has enlisted a terrific ensem-
ble to play the young pilots, who are constantly
one-upping and chicken-fighting each other: Teller
simmers convincingly with unresolved rage at Pete;
within the otherwise anonymous collection of sup-
porting players, Jay Ellis, Glen Powell and Lewis
Pullman are particularly effective as Payback, Hang-
man and Bob.
That last call sign is just one example of the
low-key humor that runs through “Top Gun: Maver-
ick,” which gratifyingly never resorts to snark or
smug winking. Although Jennifer Connelly delivers
an impressively relaxed, appealing performance as
Penny, the bar owner Pete reconnects with after an
apparently messy breakup several years ago, audi-
ences know that the real love story in a “Top Gun”
movie is between the pilots and their wingmen. In
the film’s most affecting sequence, Pete goes to see
his old frenemy Iceman (Val Kilmer), who may be
physically diminished but is no less distinguished;
it’s a get-out-your-mankerchiefs moment played
with taste, restraint and sincerity that’s as disarming
as it is quietly authentic.At the center of all the turning and burning,
banking and nosediving and bro’ing down sits Cruise
— wearier, warier, but still in complete control like
few other stars who have crossed into the 21st
century. As a performer, he’s both commanding and
generous, knowing exactly when to step back, when
to throw in a self-deprecating joke and when to
become Tom Freaking Cruise, in all his smiling,
instinctively charismatic glory. As a producer, he has
wisely taken the nearly 40 years in between “Top
Guns” to steward the property with care and intelli-
gence, resulting in a movie that feels familiar and
new in just the right proportions. Among its many
virtues, most amazingly, “Top Gun: Maverick” doesn’t
feel like a video game or a three-dimensional comic
book or an ad for a theme park. It splashes extrava-
gantly across the screen in its own battle against
obsolescence, as if to say: This is what movies looked
like, once. And this is what they can look like again.