Facts: Top Gun: Maverick
Genre: Action
Premiere: May 25, 2022
Starring: Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly and more
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
Playing time: 2 hours 11 minutes
Age limit: 11 years
Rating: + + +
Pilot model sunglasses, t-shirt over fit chest and then leather pie and fast motorcycle at sunset on it. Check, check and check.
Tom Cruise nurtures his brand as an actionman with a youthful aura, even though his cocky Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in this sequel to “Top Gun” quickly realizes that his task will not be to be in the hot air himself. He will instead teach the young, hot, future generation in the flight training Top Gun – an elite unit in the US Navy – before a very risky assignment.
How should the aviator king’s ego cope, one might wonder? Well, is old oldest?
So here in NATO times, it is of course a little extra interesting to get an insight into the everyday lives of our future military colleagues. The mission given to the pilot is to strike at one of the “enemies of our NATO allies”, but the threat never becomes more specific.
Just as in the original film, the focus is more on the internal relations within the group than on any major political game. This time, the plot is sharpened by the fact that Maverick’s unfortunate old friend Goose’s son, who is successfully called Rooster (Tuppen), now goes on Top Gun and has a horn in the side of Maverick.
On the whole, “Maverick” mostly reflects the old original film without really coming close to creating its own, iconic scenes. There is more audience courtship – some lines are really fun – than something really original, although the many flight scenes are of course a kind of aircraft’s equivalent to the car chases’ “Fast and furious” reels. That is: captivating, expensive and extremely action-packed.
Soon 60-year-old Tom Cruise will do his utmost to prove that he is still going strong – and he no doubt is.
But most of the hero is in the end Val Kilmer, who, marked by his very real throat cancer, briefly appears as Iceman in the film and hugs Tom Cruise’s Maverick.
It will be the strongest moment in a film that is otherwise as light as a summer torment – it will fully entertain and surely dominate the charts, and then fade.
Maverick (Tom Cruise) becomes a teacher for the new young students in the Top Gun training in “Top Gun: Maverick”. Press image.