First off, let me admit that, unlike nearly everyone else in my age group, I’ve never seen the original TOP GUN; for some reason, our household in the ’80s & ’90s just was not a Tom Cruise-filmgoing household, and I somehow managed to miss it on HBO and every other cable channel as well. My filmgoing has lots of weird gaps like that; like, I’d never seen JAWS until it came out on Blu-Ray. And yet, through the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE films I’ve come around to the Church of Cruise, Patron Saint of Cinema who continues to cheat death for our entertainment — at this point, it would feel wrong not to bear witness to his latest half-mad feat of filmmaking. Thing is, despite not actually having seen the original ’80s film, a lot felt familiar here just through cultural osmosis — ah yes, there’s “Highway to the Danger Zone,” there’s Harold Faltermeyer’s extremely ’80s synth theme, there’s Tom Cruise on a motorcycle racing a jet at the golden hour, and so on.
Mercifully, Joseph Kosinski’s film (his second sequel to a beloved ’80s flick in about a decade; his directorial debut was 2010’s TRON: LEGACY) gives you everything you need to know to understand what’s going on. Tom Cruise is Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a perpetual loose cannon Naval aviator who has deliberately avoided promotion in order to keep flying planes well into his fifties. Having danced between the lines of regulations yet again, before he can be reprimanded his former wingman, Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazanski (Val Kilmer), orders him back to TOPGUN as an instructor to prepare the current best of the best for an incredibly dangerous mission that — let’s face it — is basically the trench run from the original STAR WARS.
Complicating matters for Maverick are the fact that A. the local watering hole is run by an old flame, Penny (Jennifer Connelly, turning thin material into something resembling a person through sheer force of acting and charm), and B. one of the pilots he’s got to get ready for this is Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of his friend and radar operator Nick “Goose” Bradshaw, who died in the previous film. Oh, and of course the brass he’s answering to — Vice Admiral Beau “Cyclone” Simpson (Jon Hamm in “professional asshole” mode) and Rear Admiral Solomon “Warlock” Bates (Charles Parnell) — aren’t thrilled to have him there, either.
Throughout the movie there’s a lot made about Maverick living in a past that’s dying around him — Ed Harris‘s admiral at the start is trying to shut down the project Maverick is test piloting for to move the money into drone development, much like the future military of the TOP GUN-inspired MACROSS PLUS did. (No, we do not get to see Tom Cruise push his flying skills to the limit fighting a technologically advanced drone.) Kilmer appears as Iceman about halfway through, and of course, the role is written around the fact that Kilmer can barely speak above a whisper these days due to a bout with throat cancer; Iceman is given the same diagnosis. And even with Ice having his back, the other admirals keep telling Maverick that once this is over, he’s done — no more flying for the Navy. There certainly are notes of finality here, but it all kind of gets swept away when the mission gets underway; from that point on, it’s all shocks and thrills — the spectacle of state of the art aerial combat filmmaking, which I do kinda wish I was able to see in IMAX; even at the local mall theater, it was pretty spectacular. Generally I’m much more a fan of dogfights involving spacecraft or planes that turn into robots, but these were some damn fine regular ol’ airplane dogfights.
So yes, while I doubt I’ll be circling back to the original TOP GUN any time soon, the sequel is fine, sturdy, dramatic and exciting entertainment capable of moving you even if all you know of the first one is a few hummable tunes and oft-quoted lines. Now it’s a fourteen month wait for Cruise’s NEXT big-screen spectacular, the first of two back-to-back MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE installments — and yes, I have watched the trailer more than a few times already …