- UK release: May 2022
- Director: Joseph Kosinski · Writers: Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, Christopher McQuarrie
- Studio / distributor: Paramount Pictures; Skydance Media; Jerry Bruckheimer Films
- Genre: Action drama / legacy sequel · Runtime: 130 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Tom Cruise (Top Gun, Mission: Impossible - Fallout) as Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell; Miles Teller (Whiplash) as Rooster Bradshaw; Jennifer Connelly (A Beautiful Mind) as Penny Benjamin; Glen Powell (Hidden Figures) as Hangman; Val Kilmer (Top Gun, Heat) as Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazansky
- Rotten Tomatoes: 96% critics / 99% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
A sequel arriving thirty-six years after the original is usually a warning sign, not a promise. The list of legacy follow-ups that justified the wait is short, and the list of ones that traded on a faded poster and a nostalgic needle-drop is very long. Top Gun: Maverick had every reason to sit in the second category. Tony Scott, who directed the 1986 film, is gone. Tom Cruise is the wrong side of fifty-five. The original was always more music video than aviation drama, a sun-flared recruitment advert with a volleyball scene. What lands instead is the rarest thing in modern blockbuster cinema: a sequel that takes the first film seriously, finds a real story inside it, and shoots its action for real.
The setup
Pete Mitchell, callsign Maverick, has spent three decades dodging the promotions that would ground him, content to stay a captain and a test pilot rather than fly a desk. He is pulled back to the Top Gun school not to compete but to teach, training a class of young aces for a near-impossible strike on a fortified target, the kind of mission the planners quietly assume will cost lives. Among the recruits is Rooster (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s dead wingman Goose, who blames the older man for both the past and the stalled present. The set-up is simple and the stakes are personal, which is exactly what a film built around men in fast jets needs.
The cast
Cruise carries the picture the way he has carried everything for the last decade, with a physical commitment that borders on the unhinged and an old-fashioned star wattage that younger leads rarely manage. He is good here in a quieter register too: Maverick is haunted, slightly lost, aware that his world is being handed to drones and to men half his age. Miles Teller, who was so memorable being shouted at in Whiplash, gives Rooster a wounded stubbornness that keeps the grief from turning sentimental. Glen Powell’s Hangman is the cocky rival the formula demands, played with enough charm to survive it. Jennifer Connelly grounds the romance without much to work with. The film’s most affecting passage belongs to Val Kilmer, whose Iceman returns for a single scene that is tender, brief, and quietly devastating.
The craft
This is where the film earns its reputation. Joseph Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda put the cast in real F-18s and filmed them at altitude, G-forces flattening real faces against real canopies, and the difference between this and a green-screen dogfight is the difference between watching a flight and watching a screensaver. The aerial sequences are coherent in a way action cinema has largely forgotten how to be: you always know where the planes are, what they are trying to do, and why it is hard. Eddie Hamilton’s editing keeps the geography clear at speed. Harold Faltermeyer’s anthem returns, Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe widen it out, and the result has weight without smothering the engines. It is loud, expensive cinema made by people who clearly cared about the craft of it.
How it stacks up
The honest comparison is with the original, and this is the better film by some margin, tighter, sadder, and far more exciting in the air. The other reference point is Cruise’s own Mission: Impossible - Fallout, which shares the do-it-for-real philosophy and the producer-star’s refusal to fake a stunt; this has the same practical thrill, if a touch less plot. There is a strand of The Right Stuff in its reverence for pilots as a dying breed, and a clear debt to Creed in how it uses a legacy character to lift a younger one. What it does that those films do not is make the spectacle itself the argument: real planes, real sky, real consequence.
Critics versus the rest of us
The reception has been close to unanimous, which is unusual and slightly suspicious. Critics are at 96% and audiences are higher still at 99%, and the common line is that this is the rare sequel that improves on its source. I broadly agree, with one reservation the rapture tends to skip. The story is efficient rather than surprising, the recruits beyond Rooster never quite become people, and the mission, for all its tension, runs on rails. None of that is a flaw exactly; it is a film doing precisely what it sets out to do. But it stops just short of the top tier for me.
Verdict
This is a genuinely thrilling piece of popular cinema, made with a seriousness the original never had and an aerial spectacle almost nothing else can match. I preferred it to the 1986 film comfortably, and the Iceman scene alone earns a good deal of goodwill. My one honest caveat is rewatchability: I admired it more than I will return to it, and I am not sure I would sit through the whole thing again in one go. It is the right film to see big and loud while it is in cinemas, and it more than justifies the long wait. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now. See it on the largest, loudest IMAX screen you can find; the sound design alone makes the difference.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Top Gun: Maverick went on to gross well over a billion dollars worldwide and pulled six Academy Award nominations, winning for Best Sound, an unusually warm awards reception for a summer action film. It cemented Tom Cruise’s late-career insistence on practical, big-screen spectacle, a philosophy he carried straight back into the Mission: Impossible sequels. The film is now available on disc and digital and streams on Paramount+ depending on your region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for infrequent strong language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Language: There is infrequent strong language (‘f**k’), a rude middle finger gesture, and milder terms (for example, ‘dickhead’, ‘son of a bitch’, ‘shit’, ‘balls’, ‘ass’, ‘hell’, ‘damn’, ‘Jesus’, ‘God’).
Violence: There is mild violence, including undetailed sight of planes being shot at and blown up.
Threat: There is mild threat associated with the aerial combat sequences.
Sex: There is a brief mild sex scene.
Theme: There are some upsetting scenes with references to illness.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
