Top Gun: Maverick review — Why Tom Cruise is still a showstopper

Review: Australians can finally celebrate. After three-and-a-half decades, Tom Cruise is back in a new Top Gun movie and this is why it’s a jaw dropping ripper.

TOP GUN: MAVERICK (M)

Director: Joseph Kosinski (TRON: Legacy)

Starring: Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Glen Powell, Jon Hamm.

Rating: ****1/2

A worthwhile re-entry into the danger zone

To everyone who held out hope for three-and-a-half decades there would one day be another Top Gun movie; well, that day has finally arrived.

And, against all odds, it is a day of celebration.

Not only does Top Gun: Maverick execute that rare screen miracle of being a sequel superior to its predecessor in every way, it is also a blockbuster that will have the better of almost everything you see in 2021.

This is not a nostalgic joy flight, retracing a route studded with former glories.

Sure, all of the elements that strafed audiences of the mid-1980s into a frenzy – dizzy dogfights, fizzy soundtrack cuts, corny catchphrases, a little bromance, a little romance and a lot of Tom Cruise – remain in active play here.

Jennifer Connelly and Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick.

However, shrewd scripting measures and ferocious filmmaking instincts reconfigure all of those comfortingly familiar components into something fresh, exciting, funny and genuinely thrilling.

As the movie begins, it is clear that a fighting-fit-and-50-something Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise) is still feelin’ that fabled need for speed.

As for any need for career advancement, well, let’s just say that is yet to kick in. Mav remains a low-level US Navy pilot with a highly evolved feel for just how hard an aircraft can be pushed under combat conditions.

However, after some regulation disobedience results in the destruction of an expensive prototype plane, Mav is handed one last assignment before he will be locked out of the hangar for good.

An unspecified enemy is rapidly ramping up their nuclear aspirations, and could be about to put a hole in the planet unless a uranium enrichment plant is quickly taken out.

The facility is wedged deep inside a system of mountain crevices that prohibits remote attacks from drones, and all but guarantees certain oblivion to any piloted craft that dares attempt a direct strike.

The flight plan required to even get as much as a chance to take aim at the plant invites a degree of difficulty (and a mastery of in-cockpit manoeuvres) on par with what faced Luke Skywalker at the climax of the first Star Wars.

So who better than Maverick to rejoin the Top Gun academy just in time to train up a dozen of its youngest, hungriest and best fliers to complete this spectacularly implausible suicide mission?

Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick.

No one, that’s who. And if you think Mav is just going to stand back at the end of his lecture series and allow his squad of renegade rookies to fly to the gates of hell without him, well, you’ve obviously never seen the first Top Gun.

The astonishing airborne sequences studded liberally across the foreground of Top Gun: Maverick are the principal reason to see this wildly entertaining movie.

The filmmakers resisted leaning too heavily on CGI effects and screen trickery, and instead went with real planes, open skies and actual G-forces in a successful bid to capture and elevate the viewer’s senses.

This is not to sell the storytelling short. Top Gun: Maverick also has the smarts and the soul to give us characters to both cheer for and care about.

The triumph in this department does not begin and end with Cruise’s assured display in what may prove to be his career-defining role, but it does encompass his ability to connect with players old (shout-out to Val Kilmer for his graceful and moving cameo as Iceman) and new (Miles Teller as the flyboy son of Mav’s late best bud Goose).

Top Gun: Maverick is in cinemas now

LAST SEEN ALIVE (MA15+)

Rating: **

General release

One of these days, Liam Neeson will finally abdicate his long-held throne as the king of mid-budget, low-concept action-revenge movies. Gerard Butler (Olympus Has Fallen) has been poised to succeed Neeson for ages. While he continues his agonising wait, Butler must keep his own brawny, brainless brand active with regular releases of surly screen testosterone.

Gerard Butler in Last Seen Alive.

Hence, we have Last Seen Alive, an angst-ridden, logic-challenged thriller about a fella who misplaces his missus at a service station, and all but loses his mind in his efforts to find her. En route to delivering his estranged wife Lisa (Jaimie Alexander) to her parents to give her some marital thinking time, self-absorbed real estate developer Will (Butler) fails to notice her disappearance from a roadside fuel stop until it is way too late. So, with the local small-town authorities taking way too long to consider Lisa to be a missing person, our man Will accelerates the investigation (and agitates some very bad dudes) under his own steam. Not a totally awful movie by most measures, but an absolutely forgettable one for all.

Originally published as Top Gun: Maverick review — Why Tom Cruise is still a showstopper