TOP GUN: MAVERICK **
Joseph Kosinski2022
BLURB: Vanity projects rarely come as extravagantly pompous as Top Gun: Maverick, in which Tom Cruise summons the budget and aircraft arsenal of the United States military to prove to us (and himself) that not only has he still got It, but that he’s more virile and capable than ever. Whether screaming through the sky in a supersonic jet or being fawned over by the obligatory supportive girlfriend, the actor advances an earnestly grandiose, uncomplicated image of masculine inviolability. The distance between Cruise’s character and his public persona has been all but completely collapsed; to watch Top Gun: Maverick is thus to enter into a documentary consciousness, a heightened awareness of the extra-diegetic elements that are inextricable from the film’s fiction, and vice versa. The use of real military jets - and their employment in admittedly breathtaking aerial action sequences - attests to the material, logistical, and financial magnitude of the production, while also providing a literal vehicle for indulging Cruise’s penchant for death-taunting peacocking. It’s ironic that Top Gun: Maverick goes to such lengths to feel “real” in the physical sense when its narrative, characterizations, and ideology are so consistently cartoonish. Yes, American jingoism is baked into this franchise, but did the big enemy of a 2022 sequel need to be so risibly, literally faceless? Couldn’t the new Top Gun team have used even a modicum of color or nuance or anything resembling a compelling human character trait? Of course, the absence of realism and introspection is wholly intentional, serving the film’s simple-minded purpose of lionizing Maverick and American military might, and by extension Cruise’s insatiable mid-life appetite for public displays of body-pushing self-mythologizing. “Don’t think, just do,” indeed.
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