Top Gun: Maverick, ‘an older, funnier twin’
The ‘old-fashioned’ film star is at the centre of Top Gun: Maverick, the decades-in-waiting sequel to Tony Scott’s 1986 blockbuster Top Gun.
Top Gun: Maverick (M)
In cinemas from May 26
★★★½
There’s a Hollywood story about megastars Paul Newman and Steve McQueen having a stoush over the poster for the 1974 skyscraper-on-fire movie The Towering Inferno.
As the story goes, a brokered compromise put Newman’s name a tad above the younger McQueen’s but to the right of it.
The idea was that Newman was higher but people reading left to right would see McQueen first. Each was above the movie title, as were William Holden and Faye Dunaway.
This story, whether true or apocryphal, came to mind as I settled in for the Sydney premiere of Top Gun: Maverick, the decades-in-waiting sequel to Tony Scott’s 1986 blockbuster Top Gun ($US15m budget, $US350m box office).
The first words that appear in the opening credits are Tom Cruise. The title of the $US150m movie comes later. Is Cruise, I wonder, the last of the old-fashioned movie stars, the ones who are bigger than the film itself?
There are lines in this movie, scripted by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and regular Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, that almost answer that question. “He’s the fastest man alive.” “You got some balls. I’ll give you that.”
The fast man with balls is Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise), the best fighter pilot in the US Navy but still only a captain due to his disregard for the top brass.
His rival-cum-friend from the first film, Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer) is now an admiral. There is a touching scene between the two in which Kilmer’s real illness merges with that of his character.
As everyone in this movie is known by their ranks and call signs, I’m going to dispense with the other names from here on.
The brass who need Maverick despite his attitude include Rear Admiral Hammer and Vice-Admiral Cyclone (Ed Harris and Jon Hamm, both great).
“The future’s coming and you’re not in it,’’ Hammer, who favours drone warfare, tells Maverick. I would not bet on that. Cyclone comes nearer the truth, and is funnier. “Despite your best efforts you refuse to die. You should be an admiral … or a senator.”
Fans of the original will love this movie. It is an older, funnier twin. The action shots are astonishing, yet at the same time there are nostalgic, humorous scenes that share the DNA of the original.
A few examples: Maverick helmet-less on his motorbike with a girl on the back (Jennifer Connelly is his love interest this time), or zooming his jet over Hammer’s head. Like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, Hammer does not duck.
As I left the cinema, I heard a young man say it was the best film he had ever seen. While I think he should broaden his viewing list, I understand where he is coming from.
The aerial shots – first the training exercises and then the real-world bombing raids and dogfights – are amazing (huge credit to Chilean cinematographer Claudio Miranda, who won an Oscar for Ang Lee’s Life of Pi).
You are inside the cockpit with the pilots, where the pressure, physical and emotional, is like “an elephant sitting on your chest”. And that’s what’s inside the cockpit. What is outside – hostile hi-tech fighter jets – is even deadlier.
Here’s the plot: Maverick is called back to Top Gun, the elite training ground for US Navy pilots, to assess a dozen new graduates selected for a top secret mission.
An unidentified rogue state has a nuclear enrichment plant that the US needs to blow up. It’s hidden in an underground bunker in the middle of a mountainous region.
One of the recruits, Rooster (a brilliant Miles Teller), is the son of Goose (Anthony Edwards in the original), who as fans will know met a premature end. Does Maverick blame himself for Goose’s demise? Does Rooster blame him? This is a central question in the movie.
Maverick is told he is there to teach, not fly. He must choose six people for the mission and also select a team leader. If you suspect he ends up on the mission himself, you may have hit a bullseye there.
The need to fly at low altitude means that older jets, FA-18s, must be used. Up high, these antiques are no match for the latest jets … well, unless Maverick is in the cockpit.
It’s here that I want to mention the youngish director, Joseph Kosinski. He is best-known as a CGI guy, making movies such as Tron Legacy (2010). Yet this movie does not rely on CGI. Reportedly, real US Navy fighter jets were used. The result is spectacular.
Cruise is on song throughout. He has a chance to show off his comic side, which reached its peak in Tropic Thunder (2008). He is also just a good actor, as he has shown in Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Magnolia (1999) and Collateral (2004).
This 130-minute movie is dedicated to the original director Tony Scott, younger brother of Ridley Scott, who committed suicide in 2012. There’s no way of knowing, but I think he’d applaud this high-mach continuation of his work.
I think it’s a better film than the original. It’s edgier and funnier, and just so exciting to watch. It has its flaws, including the thinness of the female roles.
There is a wonderful comic scene where Maverick and Penny (Connelly) go out on a yacht – “I don’t sail boats. I land on them,’’ Maverick pleads in his defence – but otherwise there’s not much reason for Penny, who owns a bar, to be there.
The Kelly McGillis astrophysicist character from the original is not seen or mentioned, though Penny, like her, drives a Porsche.
It does become both sentimental and jingoistic towards the end, but that’s to be expected in any action adventure about the US taking on the bad countries.
As for Cruise, who turns 60 next year, here’s the sequel I want to see: Risky Business 2. He’s 40 years older and I reckon he can still pull off the underpants dance.
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Senior Year (MA15+)
Netflix
★★★
I’ve mentioned before that my favourite film about ageing is David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), drawn from the story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and starring Brad Pitt as a man who ages in reverse.
Rebel Wilson’s new comedy, Senior Year, has some similarities, though perhaps it’s closer to Penny Marshall’s Big (1988), in which Tom Hanks is a 12-year-old boy who becomes an adult overnight.
This movie is not as good as either of those older films but it has its moments.
There are three main, and connected, comic tracks: the dominance of the digital age, the emergence of woke culture and the differences between two generations: the millennials and the zoomers.
The fuse box in which these lines link and spark is Stephanie Conway (Wilson), who awakes from a 20-year coma caused by an accident during cheerleading practice at her high school in Maryland, USA.
The first 15 minutes of this 110-minute movie explain the geographical shift. Steph (the brilliant young Australian actor Angourie Rice) moves to the US at age 14.
She is a koala out of its tree, as the “populars” at school let her know. When she invites one to her birthday party, the sneering reply is, “It’s cute that in Australia you call it a party because in America we call it a freak show.”
She decides she must fit in and over the next couple of years she does. She becomes chief cheerleader, lands a football hunk boyfriend and is determined to be crowned prom queen.
Then the mishap happens and when she next opens her eyes it is 2022. She is 37 chronologically but 17 emotionally. She has moved from adolescent to the cusp of menopause without the blink of the eye.
There’s a deep pit of emotional drama here, but unfortunately it is largely unmined. There is one standout moment, where Steph talks about her mother’s death from cancer, that reminds us that Rebel Wilson Can Act.
The director, Alex Hardcastle in his movie debut, has made television sitcoms including Parks & Recreation and The Mindy Project, and there’s a feeling he is still in that mind space.
When millennial Steph returns to school to finish what she started, her experiences with her Gen Z classmates have wisecracking moments that would zing in a half-hour TV show.
When a teacher asks whether she’s on drugs, her answer is an affirmative of sorts: “I’m still adjusting. I just found out there are eight more Fast and Furious movies!” The Instagram-addicted zoomers do not believe in the pecking orders that existed in Steph’s day. They are too woke for that.
In another humorous moment, Steph explains the need for the numbers at the end of her online handle, HotComaGirl113.
The school principal, one of Steph’s old classmates, also woke, declares she has “made a school with no losers”.
Yet is this idea of no rankings, except via social media likes and follows, just a different form of intimidation? Being bashed in the toilet block is so old school compared with being trashed before a global audience. More could have been done with this.
And more could have been done by overlapping the past and present lives of the characters, not least because it would mean more of Sydney-born Rice, who is best known for the Spider-Man movies. In this linear plot line she is terrific but not there for long enough.
The dance scenes are fun to watch, especially one to Britney Spears’s (You Drive Me) Crazy. And the post-credit outtakes are worth waiting for, particularly for one involving Wilson and fellow cast member (he has a cameo as a teacher) and co-scriptwriter Brandon Scott Jones.
This is a MA15+ movie because of swearing and sexual references, but in my personal classifications it’s a SOAR: switch off and relax.
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