The reviews for Joseph Kosinski’s “Top Gun: Maverick” will have you thinking it’s the second-coming of the action blockbuster. It is not. This nostalgia-heavy sequel to the original 1987 original (a mediocre movie in its own right), basically replicates that Tony Scott film, almost beat-for-beat.
Yes, Tom Cruise is back as wild man “Maverick,” a man who knows no limitarions in his aerial pursuits. After defying command, he’s just been dismissed from duty and sent back to “Top Gun” flight school. There he’s assigned to recruit a new crop of fighter pilots, including his deceased friend’s son “Rooster” (Miles Teller). The recruits are cocky and have no knowledge of Maverick’s reckless ways of flying.
What follows are a lot of gung-ho aerial training sequences, meant to be nail-biting for the mainstream crowd. Although well-choreographed, there’s nothing truly wondrous about watching pilots fly their jets in training simulations.
If there’s any tension, it’s between Maverick and Rooster. The latter still bitter about his father’s death, he blames Maverick who is filled with guilt. Teller and Cruise’s scenes hint at a better, more substantial film, one in which psychological games could have been better played on the ground than in the air.
Val Kilmer shows up for heartfelt cameo that turns out to be the best scene in the movie. Kosinski and Cruise stage the scene with compassion and wit as Kilmer, who lost usage of his vocal chords due to cancer, makes the best of a complicated task.
The problem with this sequel, more so than the original, is that safe for Maverick the side characters just aren’t that well-developed. You also keep wondering whether the film actually fully embraces its cheese or if it’s dead-serious in its intentions to replicate the original’s fromage.
What’s also missing is the original’s best trait: the homoerotic tension between the chiseled men at the school. During a break from training, the recruits plays a shirtless game of football in the sun-soaked beach — where’s the eroticism? Bodies clash onto one another, plenty of high-fives occur, but it all feels rather robotic and forced.
Pardon me for being the party crasher here, but it seems as though much of this sequel’s rousing critical reaction stems from a) it being a movie-movie, something that theaters badly need right now to get asses back in the seats and b) the nostalgic factor. If anything, this is a sequel that is basically an ode to itself.
I wanted director Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion) to embrace the camp. The fact that he plays it all with a straight face is such a terrible shame. [C+]