We all enjoy things that aren’t particularly good for us. Consuming a bowl of salted-caramel ice cream as a midnight snack, for example. Or catching a few extra sun-rays during a long weekend at the lake. How about listening to a symphony with the volume loud enough to make your floor beams shudder?
The same applies to moviegoing. It’s all too easy to get carried away by a film’s outer trappings – exploding cars, serial killers sneaking down dark corridors, sexy bodies writhing passionately – and ignore pretty much everything else that makes a film into something truly worth watching.
Exbibit No. 1: the entire career of director Michael Bay. Or, better yet, the recently released jet-jockey fantasy “Top Gun: Maverick.” A sequel to Tony Scott’s 1986 film “Top Gun,” starring Tom Cruise and a gaggle of other hard-bodies, “Top Gun: Maverick” takes us back to where it all began: the San Diego-based school for Navy pilots learning how to dogfight.
In the original, Cruise plays Pete “Maverick” Mitchell,” a hotshot pilot whose natural sense of cockiness sets the scene for a plot involving the learning of life lessons set against a backdrop of jaunty jingoism. You know, guys – because in the original they all were guys – who “feel the need for speed.”
Times have changed, though, both in the Navy and for Maverick himself. Now a captain, a rank he is stuck at, Maverick is a test pilot. He’s still pushing against limits, as evidenced by an opening sequence in which he defies his superiors by flying faster than advised. But because he is the best – and we know he is because, one, everyone keeps saying it, and, two, because he’s played by Cruise – Maverick is given special orders: Report for a second time to the Top Gun school. This time, though, as an instructor.
Seems a special mission is being formulated, something about a secret enemy nuclear facility that needs destroying. And Maverick is being recruited to teach a class of former Top Gun graduates – all who finished first in their class – how to fly it.
If training for such a dangerous mission isn’t enough to carry the plot, the screenwriters – five in all – add in several other storylines: the base commander (played by Jon Hamm) doesn’t like Maverick, Maverick encounters a former flame (played by Jennifer Connelly), one of the Top Gun students (played by Miles Teller) is the resentful son of Maverick’s former partner, and Maverick’s one-time Top Gun adversary and now bosom buddy (Admiral Iceman, played by Val Kilmer) is battling cancer. And so on.
Did I mention that times have changed? Navy fliers now include women, and one (callname Phoenix, played by Monica Barbaro), is among the best. And, fittingly, the movie overall reflects a similar update. Yes, there is a bareback, ab-heavy beach scene similar to the original, yet it feels a shade less testosterone-laced and distinctly more diverse.
And while Kelly McGillis – who in the original plays a Top Gun instructor and Maverick’s one-time love interest – is nowhere to be seen, the character that Connelly plays picks up the baton of womanly independence and ends up being even more of a worthy challenge to Maverick’s ego.
Unfortunately, all of this – even the socially progressive aspects – plays out in pacing that sometimes feels glacial. What director Joseph Kosinski gives us doesn’t come alive until the cast takes to the air. With the cooperation of the Navy, which fit the F/A-18 Super Hornets with cameras aimed at each actor’s face, the movie’s action sequences put us right in the cockpits with them.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that, the screenplay repeatedly strains credulity. For one, the so-called “enemy” pilots are never identified – making them, and the nuclear facility they’re protecting, merely a silly plot device. For another, Maverick – with his habit of bucking authority – would never have lasted in the Navy this long (even given his guardian angel, Iceman).
No one, of course, expects such an action flick to be believable, which is good because few things about “Top Gun: Maverick” are. Still, if you watch it on the biggest screen available – IMAX? – you may be able to ignore its shortcomings.
Just try to avoid that bowl of salted-caramel ice cream when you get home.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
Besides being a film critic for Spokane Public Radio, “Movies 101” host Dan Webster writes the Movies & More blog for Spokane7.com.