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In “Top Gun: Maverick,” the breathless, gravity and logic-defying “ Top Gun ” sequel that somehow makes all the sense in the world despite landing more than three decades after the late Tony Scott ’s original, an admiral refers to Tom Cruise ’s navy aviator Pete Mitchell—call sign “ Maverick ”—as “the fastest man alive.” It’s a chuckle-inducing scene that recalls one in “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” when Alec Baldwin ’s high-ranking Alan Hunley deems Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, “the living manifestation of destiny.” In neither of these instances are Cruise’s co-stars exclusively referring to his make-believe screen personas. They are also (or rather, primarily) talking about the ongoing legacy of Cruise the actor himself. 

Truth be told, our fearless and ever-handsome action hero earns both appraisals with a generous side of applause, being one of the precious remnants of bona-fide movie superstardoms of yore, a slowly dwindling they-don’t-make-'em-like-they-used-to notion of immortality these days. Indeed, Cruise’s consistent commitment to Hollywood showmanship—along with the insane levels of physical craft he unfailingly puts on the table by insisting to do his own stunts—I would argue, deserves the same level of high-brow respect usually reserved for the fully-method sorts such as Daniel Day-Lewis . Even if you somehow overlook the fact that Cruise is one of our most gifted and versatile dramatic and comedic actors with the likes of “ Born on the Fourth of July ,” “ Magnolia ,” “ Tropic Thunder ,” and “ Collateral ” under his belt, you will never forget why you show up to a Tom Cruise movie, thanks in large part to his aforesaid enduring dedication. How many other household names and faces can claim to guarantee “a singular movie event” these days and deliver each time, without exceptions?

In that regard, you will be right at home with “Top Gun: Maverick,” director Joseph Kosinski ’s witty adrenaline booster that allows its leading producer to be exactly what he is—a star—while upping the emotional and dramatic stakes of its predecessor with a healthy (but not overdone) dose of nostalgia. After a title card that explains what “Top Gun” is—the identical one that introduced us to the world of crème-de-la-crème Navy pilots in 1986—we find Maverick in a role on the fringes of the US Navy, working as an undaunted test pilot against the familiar backdrop of Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone.” You won’t be surprised that soon enough, he gets called on a one-last-job type of mission as a teacher to a group of recent Top Gun graduates. Their assignment is just as obscure and politically cuckoo as it was in the first movie. There is an unnamed enemy—let’s called it Russia because it’s probably Russia—some targets that need to be destroyed, a flight plan that sounds nuts, and a scheme that will require all successful Top Gun recruits to fly at dangerously low altitudes. But can it be done?

It’s a long shot, if the details of the operation—explained to the aviator hopefuls in a rather “It can’t be done” style reminiscent of “ Mission: Impossible ”—are any indication. But you will be surprised that more appealing than the prospect of the bonkers mission here is the human drama that co-scribes Ehren Kruger , Eric Warren Singer , and Christopher McQuarrie spin from a story by Peter Craig and Justin Marks . For starters, the group of potential recruits include Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw ( Miles Teller , terrific), the son of the dearly departed “Goose,” whose accidental death still haunts Maverick as much as it does the rest of us. And if Rooster’s understandable distaste of him wasn’t enough (despite Maverick’s protective instincts towards him), there are skeptics of Maverick’s credentials— Jon Hamm ’s Cyclone, for instance, can’t understand why Maverick’s foe-turned-friend Iceman ( Val Kilmer , returning with a tearjerker of a part) insists on him as the teacher of the mission. Further complicating the matters is Maverick’s on-and-off romance with Penny Benjamin (a bewitching Jennifer Connelly ), a new character that was prominently name-checked in the original movie, as some will recall. What an entanglement through which one is tasked to defend their nation and celebrate a certain brand of American pride ...

In a different package, all the brouhaha jingoism and proud fist-shaking seen in “Top Gun: Maverick” could have been borderline insufferable. But fortunately Kosinski—whose underseen and underrated “Only The Brave” will hopefully find a second life now—seems to understand exactly what kind of movie he is asked to navigate. In his hands, the tone of “Maverick” strikes a fine balance between good-humored vanity and half-serious self-deprecation, complete with plenty of quotable zingers and emotional moments that catch one off-guard.

In some sense, what this movie takes most seriously are concepts like friendship, loyalty, romance, and okay, bromance. Everything else that surrounds those notions—like patriotic egotism—feels like playful winks and embellishments towards fashioning an old-school action movie. And because this mode is clearly shared by the entirety of the cast—from a memorable Ed Harris that begs for more screen time to the always great Glen Powell as the alluringly overconfident “ Hangman ,” Greg Tarzan Davis as “Coyote,” Jay Ellis as “ Payback ,” Danny Ramirez as “Fanboy,” Monica Barbaro as “ Phoenix ,” and Lewis Pullman as “Bob”—“Top Gun: Maverick” runs fully on its enthralling on-screen harmony at times. For evidence, look no further than the intense, fiery chemistry between Connelly and Cruise throughout—it’s genuinely sexy stuff—and (in a nostalgic nod to the original), a rather sensual beach football sequence, shot with crimson hues and suggestive shadows by Claudio Miranda . 

Still, the action sequences—all the low-altitude flights, airborne dogfights as well as Cruise on a motorcycle donned in his original Top Gun leather jacket—are likewise the breathtaking stars of “Maverick,” often accompanied by Harold Faltermeyer ’s celebratory original score (aided by cues from Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe ). Reportedly, all the flying scenes—a pair of which are pure hell-yes moments for Cruise—were shot in actual U.S. Navy F/A-18s, for which the cast had to be trained for during a mind-boggling process. The authentic work that went into every frame generously shows. As the jets cut through the atmosphere and brush their target soils in close-shave movements—all coherently edited by Eddie Hamilton —the sensation they generate feels miraculous and worthy of the biggest screen one can possibly find. Equally worthy of that big screen is the emotional strokes of “Maverick” that pack an unexpected punch. Sure, you might be prepared for a second sky-dance with “Maverick,” but perhaps not one that might require a tissue or two in its final stretch.

Available in theaters May 27th. 

Tomris Laffly

Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes to  RogerEbert.com , Variety and Time Out New York, with bylines in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Journal International, Vulture, The Playlist and The Wrap, among other outlets.

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Film credits.

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action, and some strong language.

131 minutes

Tom Cruise as Captain Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell

Miles Teller as Lt. Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw

Jennifer Connelly as Penny Benjamin

Jon Hamm as Vice Admiral Cyclone

Glen Powell as Hangman

Lewis Pullman as Bob

Charles Parnell as Warlock

Bashir Salahuddin as Coleman

Monica Barbaro as Phoenix

Jay Ellis as Payback

Danny Ramirez as Fanboy

Greg Tarzan Davis as Coyote

Ed Harris as Rear Admiral

Val Kilmer as Admiral Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky

Manny Jacinto as Fritz

• Joseph Kosinski

Writer (based on characters created by)

• Jack Epps Jr.

Writer (story by)

• Peter Craig
• Justin Marks
• Ehren Kruger
• Eric Warren Singer
• Christopher McQuarrie

Cinematographer

• Claudio Miranda
• Chris Lebenzon
• Eddie Hamilton
• Lorne Balfe
• Harold Faltermeyer
• Hans Zimmer

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‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Review: Will This Stuff Still Fly?

Tom Cruise takes to the air once more in a long-awaited sequel to a much-loved ’80s action blockbuster.

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By A.O. Scott

Every so often in “Top Gun: Maverick,” Pete Mitchell (that’s Maverick) is summoned to a face-to-face with an admiral. Pete, after all these years in the Navy — more than 35, but who’s counting — has stalled at the rank of captain. He’s one of the best fighter pilots ever to take wing, but the U.S. military hierarchy can be a treacherous political business, and Maverick is anything but a politician. In the presence of a superior officer he is apt to salute, smirk and push his career into the middle of the table like a stack of poker chips. He’s all in. Always.

The first such meeting is with Rear Adm. Chester Cain, a weathered chunk of brass played by Ed Harris, who has an impressive in-movie flight record of his own. (Without “The Right Stuff,” there would have been no “Top Gun.”) He seems to be telling Pete that the game is over. Thanks to new technology, flyboys like him are all but obsolete.

Based on this scene, you might think that the movie is setting out to be a meditation on American air power in the age of drone warfare, but that will have to wait for the next sequel. Pete still has a job to do. A teaching job, officially, but we’ll get to that. The conversation with Cain is not so much a red herring as a meta-commentary. Pete, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, is the avatar of Tom Cruise, and the central question posed by this movie has less to do with the necessity of combat pilots than with the relevance of movie stars. With all this cool new technology at hand — you can binge 37 episodes of Silicon Valley grifting without leaving your couch — do we really need guys, or movies, like this?

“Top Gun: Maverick,” directed by Joseph Kosinski ( “Tron: Legacy” ), answers in the affirmative with a confident, aggressive swagger that might look like overcompensation. Not that there is a hint of insecurity in Cruise’s performance — or in Maverick’s. On the brink of 60, he still projects the nimble, cocky, perennially boyish charm that conquered the box office in the 1980s.

Back then — in Tony Scott’s “Top Gun” — Pete was a brash upstart striving to stand out amid the camaraderie and competition of the super-elite Top Gun program. He seduced the instructor Charlie (Kelly McGillis), locked horns with his golden-boy nemesis, Iceman (Val Kilmer), and lost his best friend and radar intercept officer, Goose (Anthony Edwards). Ronald Reagan was president and the Cold War was in its florid final throes, but “Top Gun” wasn’t really a combat picture. It was, at heart, a sports movie decked out in battle gear, about a bunch of guys showboating, trash talking and trying to outdo one another.

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Top Gun: Maverick First Reviews: The Most Thrilling Blockbuster We've Gotten in Years

Critics say the long-awaited sequel is a must-see on the big screen and not only potentially better than the original, but also one of the best tom cruise movies ever..

TAGGED AS: Action , blockbusters , Film , films , movie , movies

Tom Cruise returns to the cockpit in Top Gun: Maverick , the long-awaited follow-up to the 1986 blockbuster Top Gun . And if you’re not already feeling the need for speed — again — then you might want to reconsider, because the first reviews for this legacy sequel are clear of the danger zone. In fact, many are even calling it a better movie than the original, and maybe even one of the best Tom Cruise movies of all time.

Here’s what critics are saying about Top Gun: Maverick :

Will Top Gun fans be happy?

On the whole, this is a thrilling sequel which is bound to delight fans of the first film. – Linda Marric, The Jewish Chronicle

It’s a follow-up that will thrill every Top Gun fan. – Philip De Semlyen, Time Out

Mainstream audiences will be happily airborne, especially the countless dads who loved Top Gun and will eagerly want to share this fresh shot of adrenaline with their sons. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

This follow-up, directed by Joseph Kosinski, deals in the same unexpected-itch-scratching bliss: it’s crammed with images you didn’t know you were desperate to see until the second you see them. – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

In the opening moments… you don’t know if you’re watching the original 1986 Top Gun or a new one. – Brian Truitt, USA Today

Tony Scott’s admirers may miss that disreputable edge, the unrepentantly vulgar sensibility that made the original Top Gun a dreamy, voluptuous hoot. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

(Photo by Scott Garfield/©Paramount Pictures)

How does it compare to the original?

Top Gun: Maverick improves on the original. It’s deeper, it’s not corny, and it has thrilling effects. – Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

The dogfights, chases, and mid-air sequences are truly remarkable — far clearer and far more intense than anything in the original Top Gun . – Matt Singer, ScreenCrush

A superior sequel. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

If Top Gun was a fun film because it invented Tom Cruise, Maverick is a great film because it immortalizes him. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Maverick ideally would be less formulaic – and for the record, it doesn’t quite match the magic of the OG Top Gun . – Brian Truitt, USA Today

Is it a worthy legacy sequel?

Few Hollywood reboots can boast this blend of nostalgia, freshness and adrenaline. You will want to high five someone on the way out. – Philip De Semlyen, Time Out

The film is a true legacy sequel. In the tradition of Star Wars: The Force Awakens , it’s a carefully reconstructed clone of its predecessor, tooled not only to reflect changing tastes and attitudes but the ascendancy of its star Tom Cruise to a level of fame that borders on the mythological. – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

The sequel follows the original beat for beat, to a degree that’s almost comical. And yet, as formulaic as it is, there’s no denying that it delivers in terms of both nostalgia and reinvention. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Tom Cruise remains deeply ambivalent with the notion of passing the torch to a new generation onscreen and so Top Gun: Maverick remains focused on Maverick and his story, sometimes to the detriment of the young cast. – Matt Singer, ScreenCrush

(Photo by ©Paramount Pictures)

Is this one of the best blockbusters we’ve gotten in recent years?

Top Gun: Maverick is as thrilling as blockbusters get. – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

Top Gun: Maverick is the most fun I’ve had watching a big dumb Hollywood blockbuster for a while. – Linda Marric, The Jewish Chronicle

Takes to the skies as no blockbuster has before. – Peter Debruge, Variety

The movie soars – a reminder of how good Hollywood can be at popcorn entertainment when it sets its mind to it (and Cruise is involved). – Philip De Semlyen, Time Out

It is unquestionably the best studio action film to have been released since 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road . – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

How does it rank against other Tom Cruise movies?

We have surely arrived at the Cruisiest film he’s yet made. – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

It’s not a Tom Cruise movie so much as it’s “ Tom Cruise: The Movie .” – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

In terms of performance, this is one of Cruise’s best pictures. – Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

It fully surrenders to the grandiose fun that’s marked the best of Cruise’s recent star vehicles. – Jake Cole, Slant Magazine

Cruise finds new ways to add depth to his signature character (sorry, Ethan Hunt) without sacrificing any of his essential qualities. – Brian Truitt, USA Today

How is Val Kilmer’s return as Iceman?

Kilmer’s brief cameo, in what has the feel of a swan song, carries far more weight than anything directly related to the story. – Jake Cole, Slant Magazine

The film’s most moving element comes during the brief screen time of Kilmer’s Iceman. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

If there’s one scene that really takes your breath away, it’s his. – Brian Truitt, USA Today

In one fictional moment, he gives us something unmistakably, irreducibly real, partly by puncturing the fantasy of human invincibility that his co-star has never stopped trying to sell. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

Are there any other standouts in the cast?

Miles Teller [gives] an oddly alluring performance that really shouldn’t work as well as it does. – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

Teller, with his best turn since Whiplash, factors in as a worthy emotional foil. – Brian Truitt, USA Today

Jennifer Connelly brings a lot to a thankless role. – Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

Does Top Gun: Maverick deliver as an action movie?

It [has] what is surely one of the most impressive plane-based action scenes ever committed to film. – Matt Singer, ScreenCrush

The real draw here is, of course, the action, and Kosinski asserts his gift for large-scale filmmaking across the film’s runtime. – Jake Cole, Slant Magazine

The commitment to filming practically-everything practically feels like the cutting-edge equivalent of Howard Hughes’ history-making Hell’s Angels . – Peter Debruge, Variety

You have a series of character-driven, heart-in-your-throat dogfights more vivid than anything in the first previous film. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Breathtakingly balletic, and grounded in the increasingly rare pleasure of the tangible… it’s a true feat for director Joseph Kosinski to make something this ambitious look this effortless. – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

The action scenes [have] a breathtaking beauty and urgency: the play of light and gravity on the actors’ faces, and the way the landscapes spin and drop away balletically through the canopy glass, puts other blockbusters’ green-screened swooping to shame. – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

The best thing this movie does is boost visceral analog action over the usual numbing bombardment of CG fakery. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Are there any major criticisms?

One would have appreciated a slightly more effective female-centric subplot. – Linda Marric, The Jewish Chronicle

The film, unfortunately, doesn’t extend as much of a loving hand toward the women of Top Gun . – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

Women are few and far between, and even the more prominent ones get mostly perfunctory treatment. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

It would’ve been nice to see Meg Ryan return as the widow/mom, but the rules are cruel when it comes to aging female actors. – Peter Debruge, Variety

Do we need to see this on the big screen?

This is definitely a film that benefits from the IMAX experience, and the big-ass soundscape that comes with it. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

This movie needs the big screen, preferably as big as you can find. I saw it in an IMAX theater, and now I have some idea of what it would feel like to take off in a fighter pilot from an aircraft carrier. – Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

The result is the most immersive flight simulator audiences will have ever experienced, right down to the great Dolby roar of engines vibrating through their seats. – Peter Debruge, Variety

It’s the kind of edge-of-your-seat, fist-pumping spectacular that can unite an entire room full of strangers sitting in the dark and leave them with a wistful tear in their eye. – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

Will it leave us wanting more?

One can imagine future spinoffs involving any of these characters. – Peter Debruge, Variety

[It’s a] launching pad for a potential second or even third sequel with its young cast at the center of new adventures. – Linda Marric, The Jewish Chronicle

Top Gun: Maverick opens in theaters on May 27, 2022.

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‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Review: Tom Cruise Takes to the Skies, Literally, in Barrier-Breaking Sequel

Reteaming with 'Oblivion' director Joseph Kosinski, the perfectionist producer-star insists on flying his own planes in this stunning follow-up.

By Peter Debruge

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The world is not the same place it was in 1986, when “Top Gun” ruled the box office. In Ronald Reagan, America had a movie star for a president, and producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson as its honorary ministers of propaganda. The same year that “Platoon” challenged the United States’ militaristic track record, “Top Gun” sold a thrilling if narrow-minded fantasy of American exceptionalism — of boys and their toys, of macho-man bromance and what it means to be the best. Three years after Tom Cruise flipped the bird to a Russian MiG fighter plane, the Berlin Wall fell. Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed.

One could argue that our new, post-Cold War world didn’t need a “Top Gun” sequel. (Tom Cruise himself once insisted as much.) But one would be wrong to do so. Building on the three-parts-steel-to-one-part-corn equation that director Tony Scott so effectively set 36 years earlier, the new film more than merits its existence, mirroring Cruise’s character, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, in pushing the limits of what the machine could do — the machine in this case being cinema, which takes to the skies as no blockbuster has before.

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Hardly anything in “ Top Gun: Maverick ” will surprise you, except how well it does nearly all the things audiences want and expect it to do. Orchestrated by Joseph Kosinski — the dynamo who collaborated with Cruise on “Oblivion” and first worked with Miles Teller on 2017’s terrific, underseen firefighter drama “Only the Brave” — to appeal to veterans and neophytes alike, this high-performance follow-up sends Maverick back to the Topgun program, where he won the heart of Charlie (Kelly McGillis) and lost best friend Goose (Anthony Edwards).

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Flashbacks notwithstanding, neither of those actors is in this movie, though the screenplay — a tag-team effort between Christopher McQuarrie (Cruise’s guy), Eric Warren Singer (Kosinski’s guy) and Ehren Kruger (yikes) — just about resurrects Goose via his now-adult son, Bradley Bradshaw (Teller), call sign “Rooster.” (“Phoenix” would be more apt, but that tag goes to Monica Barbaro, playing the lone woman in this testosterone pool.) The resemblance between Rooster and his late dad is uncanny, courtesy of a goofy moustache, some hair gel and a scene in which the young pilot pounds out “Great Balls of Fire” on the Hard Deck piano, the way Goose once did.

The Hard Deck is now operated by a character from Maverick’s past, Penny Benjamin ( Jennifer Connelly ), although she was only referenced in passing before: In “Top Gun,” Maverick is chewed out by his superior officer for having “a history of high-speed passes over five air control towers — and one admiral’s daughter!” Penny is that daughter: strong, independent and responsible for a daughter of her own (not Maverick’s, and too young to be his love interest). Cruise’s character has matured on the womanizing front, and the movie provides a shallow yet satisfying romantic subplot between him and Penny, which gives him something to come home for, since his daredevil tendencies otherwise give off strong kamikaze vibes.

In theory, Maverick should have graduated Topgun and gone back to teach what he’d learned to other Navy pilots. But after losing his flying partner, the character wound up being more of a loner — or so we learn, catching up with him all these years later, working as a test pilot and stuck at the rank of captain. Following a nostalgia-baiting aircraft carrier landing montage, wherein “Top Gun” theme “Danger Zone” blazes once again, Kosinski tracks Maverick to the Mojave Desert, still living up to his nickname when he takes a multimillion-dollar piece of government equipment — a supersonic, SR-71 Blackbird-style (fictional) Darkstar jet — out for a speed test.

Showing up as none-too-amused Navy brass, Ed Harris arrives just in time to eat a face full of sand as Maverick takes off at rocket speed, gently pushing the plane to Mach 10. (As a point of reference, the F-14s seen in “Top Gun” top out around Mach 2.) It’s a glorious scene, and one that melds everything Maverick once represented with Cruise’s own off-screen personality — which also explains all the self-driven motorcycle rides. The stunt nearly gets Maverick kicked out of the Navy. His only option: Go back to the training academy, where Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer) is now filling Tom Skerritt/Viper’s shoes.

The script incorporates Kilmer’s throat cancer, such that Iceman has just one scene, communicating mostly by keyboard — but it’s a smart one, paying off the way the dynamic between these two ex-rivals has evolved. Considering the importance Goose and Rooster play in this next mission, which involves a near-impossible airstrike on a uranium plant, it would’ve been nice to see Meg Ryan return as the widow/mom, but the rules are cruel when it comes to aging female actors. Meanwhile, we can talk about all the cosmetic ways Cruise and Kilmer’s faces have evolved, although there’s only one change that matters: Cruise has perfected that little jaw-clenching trick that signifies “This is a really tough call.”

He won’t get an Oscar for pantomiming such swallow-your-pride stoicism, though Cruise deserves one for everything else the role demanded of him: If the flying scenes here blow your mind, it’s because a great many of them are the real deal, putting audiences right there in the cockpit alongside a cast who learned to pilot for their parts. The idea here is that Maverick has been grounded, relegated to coaching a dozen top-of-their-class hotshots, though he takes to the skies right away, trumping all of these aces in a series of adrenaline-fueled drills. Not a one of these students is convincing as a Navy pilot, though their personalities win us over all the same (even Glen Powell’s alpha-male “Hangman,” who serves as this movie’s Iceman equivalent), and once can imagine future spinoffs involving any of these characters.

“Top Gun” has always been “The Tom Cruise Show,” and no one believes for a second that Maverick won’t maneuver his way into flying the climactic mission. But he can’t do it alone: The operation calls for perfectly coordinated teamwork among six pilots, recalling the group air battle that bonded Iceman and Maverick in the original movie.

These days, videogame-styled blockbusters rely so heavily on CGI that it’s thrilling to see the impact of gravity on actual human beings, pancaked to their chairs by multiple G-forces. Sophisticated movie magic makes their performances seamless with the exterior airborne shots, while the commitment to filming practically everything practically feels like the cutting-edge equivalent of Howard Hughes’ history-making “Hell’s Angels.” The result is the most immersive flight simulator audiences will have ever experienced, right down to the great Dolby roar of engines vibrating through their seats (while the score teases cues for Lady Gaga’s end-credits anthem “Hold My Hand”).

Early on, Ed Harris’ character warns Maverick and his team that “one day, they won’t need pilots at all,” by which he means, drone technology is not far from allowing the Navy to do all of its flying by remote control. Cinema seems to be moving in that same direction, replacing actors with digital puppets and real locations with greenscreen plates — but not if Tom Cruise has anything to do with it. Engineered to hit so many of the same pleasure points as the original, “Top Gun: Maverick” fulfills our desire to go really fast, really far above ground — what the earlier film unforgettably referred to as “the need for speed.”

Still, this buckle-up follow-up also demonstrates why we feel the need for movie stars. It goes well beyond Cruise’s rah-rah involvement in what amounts to a glorified U.S. military recruitment commercial (the 1986 film might have been as perfectly calibrated as a Swiss watch, but it wasn’t subtle about its GI Joe agenda). It’s the way we identify with the guy when he’s doing what most of us thought impossible. Turns out we need Maverick now more than ever.

Reviewed at AMC Century City 15 (Imax), May 10, 2022. In Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition). MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 130 MIN.

• Production: A Paramount Pictures release of a Paramount Pictures, Skydance, Jerry Bruckheimer Films presentation of a Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer production. Producers: Jerry Bruckheimer, Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie, David Ellison. Executive producers: Tommy Harper, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, Chad Oman, Mike Stenson.
• Crew: Director: Joseph Kosinski. Screenplay: Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, Christopher McQuarrie; story: Peter Craig, Justin Marks, based on characters created by Jim Cash & Jack Epps Jr. Camera: Claudio Miranda. Editor: Eddie Hamilton. Music: Lorne Balfe, Harold Faltermeyer, Hans Zimmer.
• With: Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Charles Parnell, Bashir Salahuddin, Monica Barbaro, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Greg Tarzan Davis, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer.

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Tom cruise in ‘top gun: maverick’: film review.

The ace fighter pilot returns 36 years after first feeling the need for speed in Joseph Kosinski’s sequel, also starring Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly and Jon Hamm.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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As inescapable a pop-cultural totem as 1986’s Top Gun became, Tony Scott’s testosterone-powered blockbuster has all the narrative complexity of a music video crossed with a military recruitment reel. It’s hard to think of many more emblematic products of the rah-rah patriotism of the Reagan years, with its vigorous salute to American exceptionalism and triumph over a Cold War enemy left purposely vague — hey, don’t want to shut out a lucrative foreign market.

All that has only continued to toxify in the post-Trump age, with patriotism curdling into white supremacy. So depending on where you sit on the political spectrum, your enjoyment of Top Gun: Maverick might depend on how much you’re willing to shut out the real world and surrender to movie-star magic.

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Venue : Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition) Release date : Friday, May 27 Cast : Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Lewis Pullman, Charles Parnell, Bashir Salahuddin, Monica Barbaro, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Greg Tarzan Davis Director : Joseph Kosinski Screenwriters : Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, Christopher McQuarrie

Which this superior sequel — directed with virtuoso technical skill, propulsive pacing and edge-of-your-seat flying sequences by Joseph Kosinski — has in abundance. Every frame of Tom Cruise ’s Maverick is here to remind you, soaking up the awestruck admiration of the young hot shots ready to dismiss him as a fossil and the initially begrudging respect of the military brass who try and fail to pull the cocky individualist into line. “He’s the fastest man alive,” one of the slack-jawed hero worshippers in the control room says early on. And that’s even before he does his signature robotic “Cruise Run.”

“It’s not the plane, it’s the pilot,” we hear more than once. And Cruise leaves no question that he’s the pilot, despite hiring a pro craft team and a solid ensemble cast who were put through extensive flight training. Even the relic F-14 Tomcat, Maverick’s tactical fighter plane of choice in the first movie, gets fired up for a glory lap, a salute to aged movie stars and old technology in one. Cruise’s character is somehow positioned by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie’s screenplay as simultaneously a rule-breaking rebel and a selfless saint. That makes this a work of breathtaking egomania outdone only by the fawning tone of Paramount’s press notes.

Starting when Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” accompanies footage of new-generation F-18 hornets slicing through the clouds and swooping down onto an aircraft carrier amid a sea of high-fives, fist-pumps and thumbs-up, the sequel follows the original beat for beat, to a degree that’s almost comical. And yet, as formulaic as it is, there’s no denying that it delivers in terms of both nostalgia and reinvention. Mainstream audiences will be happily airborne, especially the countless dads who loved Top Gun and will eagerly want to share this fresh shot of adrenaline with their sons.

Pete “Maverick” Mitchell lives alone in a Mojave Desert hangar with a photo shrine on the wall to his former radar intercept officer and best buddy Goose, who died during a training accident in the first film. (Anthony Edwards and Meg Ryan are seen in a helpful recap framed as Pete’s tortured memories.)

Maverick zooms into the Naval base on his Kawasaki each day and continues to get his kicks as a daredevil test pilot, resisting the advancement in rank from captain that would have grounded him by now. But when his aerial showboating pisses off Admiral Cain (Ed Harris), who’s pushing to transition to drone aircrafts and make stick jockeys obsolete, Maverick gets his wings clipped.

Despite having lasted just two months as an instructor almost 30 years ago, he’s reassigned to the elite Fighter Weapons School, aka Top Gun Academy, in San Diego, which was established in 1969 to train the top 1 percent of Naval aviators. Neither Cain nor the academy’s senior officer, call sign “Cyclone” ( Jon Hamm ), wanted him for the job. But Maverick’s former rival and eventual wingman Iceman (Val Kilmer), who went on to become an admiral and command the U.S. Pacific Fleet, convinced them he was the only man who could prepare pilots for a top-secret mission.

A uranium enrichment plant has been detected on enemy soil — once again, exactly which enemy is unclear — and two pairs of F-18s need to sneak in, bomb the bejesus out of it and then get out fast, overcoming a near-impossible quick climb over rocky peaks and then surviving the inevitable blast of enemy missiles and aerial dogfights.

The candidates for that mission are “the best of the best,” former star graduates who are pretty much a repeat of the 1986 bunch aside from being more culturally diverse. There’s even — gasp! — a woman, Phoenix (Monica Barbaro). The two that matter most, though, are swaggering blowhard Hangman (Glen Powell) and Goose’s son Rooster ( Miles Teller ), still carrying around the ghost of his father and hostile to Maverick for stalling his career by taking his name off the Naval Academy list.

The Hangman-Rooster dynamic more or less mirrors the Iceman-Maverick friction from Top Gun , just as the incongruously homoerotic shirtless volleyball scene is echoed here with a rowdy team-building football game on the beach.

The only notable place where the screenwriters don’t genuflect to the original model is with Kelly McGillis’ astrophysicist and civilian Top Gun instructor Charlie, who declined a plum Washington job to stick with her man but doesn’t even rate a mention here. Instead, Maverick sparks up an old romance with Penny ( Jennifer Connelly ), a single mom with fabulous highlights. She runs a local bar — its name, The Hard Deck, doubles as a tactical plot point — which apparently puts her in an income bracket to own a sleek sailboat and drive a Porsche. (Producer Jerry Bruckheimer never met a power vehicle he didn’t love.)

Maverick’s task during training is to test the limits of the super-competitive candidates, whittling them down from 12 to six and choosing a team leader. “It’s not what I am. It’s who I am,” he says of his aviator vocation during a rare moment of self-doubt. “How do I teach that?” Anyone failing to guess who’ll land the team leader spot and who’ll be their wingman isn’t paying attention.

The simmering conflict between Maverick and Rooster — who can’t see past his resentment to perceive the protective responsibility his dad’s friend feels toward him — provides an emotional core even if the role makes scant demands on Teller’s range. But that’s true also of Connelly, Hamm and everyone else in the cast; all of them get the job done while remaining satellites that merely orbit around Cruise’s glittering Planet Alpha, eventually having to acknowledge that Maverick’s a helluva guy no matter what stunts he pulls.

The film’s most moving element comes during the brief screen time of Kilmer’s Iceman, whose health issues reflect those suffered by the actor in real life, generating resonant pathos. There’s reciprocal warmth, even love, in a scene between Iceman and Maverick that acknowledges the characters’ hard-won bond as well as the rivalry that preceded it, with gentle humor.

Kosinski (who directed Cruise in Oblivion ), the writers and editor Eddie Hamilton keep a close eye on the balance between interpersonal drama and flight maneuvers; scenes intercut between field practice and classroom discussions during which Maverick points out fatal errors on a computer simulator are particularly sharp. This is all nuts-and-bolts buildup, however, to the mission itself, in which hair-raising action, seemingly insurmountable setbacks and miraculous saves keep the tension pumped.

This is definitely a film that benefits from the Imax experience and the big-ass soundscape that comes with it. The muscular score by Harold Faltermeyer, Lady Gaga and Hans Zimmer also pulls its weight, with Gaga’s song, “Hold My Hand,” getting prime romantic placement. Musical choices elsewhere tend to lean into a retro vibe — Bowie, T. Rex, Foghat, The Who — while Teller gets to hammer the piano keys and lead a Jerry Lee Lewis sing-along that pays direct homage to his screen dad.

The most memorable part of Top Gun: Maverick — and the scenes that will make new generations swell with pride and adulation for good old American heroism — are the dogfights and tactical maneuvers of the pilots. Just as they should be. The best thing this movie does is boost visceral analog action over the usual numbing bombardment of CG fakery, a choice fortified by having the actors in the airborne cockpits during shooting.

Cinematographer Claudio Miranda’s work benefits from the technological advances of the past three decades, with camera rigs allowing for you-are-there verisimilitude. Cruise’s insistence on doing his own flying is undeniably impressive, even if the headgear’s breathing apparatus gets in the way of his trademark clenched-jaw intensity. No one is going to dispute that he works hard in this movie, justifying the labor of love. But no one is going to come out of it concerned for his self-esteem, either.

Full credits

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition) Distribution: Paramount Production companies: Skydance, Jerry Bruckheimer Films Cast: Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Charles Parnell, Bashir Salahuddin, Monica Barbaro, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Greg Tarzan Davis, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer Director: Joseph Kosinski Screenwriters: Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, Christopher McQuarrie Story: Peter Craig, Justin Marks, based on characters created by Jim Cash, Jack Epps Jr. Producers: Jerry Bruckheimer, Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie, David Ellison Executive producers: Tommy Harper, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, Chad Oman, Mike Stenson Director of photography: Claudio Miranda Production designer: Jeremy Hindle Costume designer: Marlene Stewart Music: Harold Faltermeyer, Lady Gaga, Hans Zimmer Editor: Eddie Hamilton Visual effects supervisor: Ryan Tudhope Aerial coordinator: Kevin LaRosa II Casting: Denise Chamian

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Review: Tom Cruise flies high — again — in the exhilarating ‘Top Gun: Maverick’

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“If you think, you’re dead.” That’s one of Tom Cruise’s more memorable lines from “Top Gun,” a cautionary reminder that when your engine flames out or an enemy pilot locks you in their sights, hesitation means death. Inadvertently, the line also suggests the best way to enjoy Tony Scott’s immortal 1986 blockbuster: Best not to think too long or hard about the dumb plot, the threadbare romance, the fetishization of U.S. military might or the de rigueur plausibility issues. The key is to succumb, like Cruise’s high-flying Maverick himself, to a world of unchecked instinct and pure sensation, to savor the movie’s symphony of screaming jets and booming Giorgio Moroder, not to mention all those lovingly photographed torsos and tighty-whities.

Jets still scream and muscles still gleam in the ridiculous and often ridiculously entertaining “Top Gun: Maverick,” though in several respects, the movie evinces — and rewards — an unusual investment of brainpower. I’d go further and say that it offers its own decisive reversal of Maverick’s dubious logic: It has plenty on its mind, and it’s gloriously alive.

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A lot of consideration and calculation have clearly gone into this long-aborning blockbuster sequel, insofar as Cruise (one of the producers) and his collaborators have taken such clear pains to maintain continuity with the events, if not the style, of the first film. That’s no small thing, more than 30 years after the fiery young Maverick lost Goose, made peace with Iceman and rode off into the annals of fictional U.S. Navy history. And rather than let bygones be bygones, the director Joseph Kosinski and a trio of screenwriters (Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Cruise’s favorite auteur-wingman, Christopher McQuarrie) have resurrected those threads of rivalry, tragedy and triumph and spun them into uncharted realms of male-weepie grandiosity.

Some of this continuity is a matter of basic story sense, rooted in a shrewd understanding of franchise mechanics and an equally savvy appeal to ’80s nostalgia. But it also has something to do with the 59-year-old Cruise’s close stewardship of his own superhuman image, a commitment that speaks to his talent as well as his monomania. And with the arguable exception of “Mission: Impossible’s” Ethan Hunt, few Cruise characters have felt as aligned with that monomania as Maverick. From the moment he entered the frame in ’86, sporting flippant aviator shades and riding a Kawasaki motorcycle, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell announced himself as a signature Cruise creation — a precision-tooled amalgam of underwear-dancing sex symbol (just three years after “Risky Business”) and the envelope-pushing, heights-scaling action star he would become.

These days, the need for speed still persists for both Cruise and Maverick, even if the latter does more flying than running. But for all the barriers he’s broken and all the miles he’s logged in his career as a Navy test pilot, Maverick occupies a state of self-willed professional stasis. Unwilling to be promoted into desk-job irrelevancy, he is a captain by rank and a rebel by nature. The opening sequence finds him playing Icarus with one of the Navy’s shiny new toys, thumbing his nose in the process at the first of the movie’s two glowering authoritarians. (They’re played by Ed Harris and Jon Hamm.) Old habits die hard, but so do the ghosts of the past, and Maverick, for all his reckless abandon in the cockpit, will soon find himself breaking his own rules by thinking more carefully, and tactically, than he’s ever had to do before.

Called back to the elite Navy training school where he flew planes, defied orders and irritated his peers with distinction, Maverick is charged with preparing the program’s best and brightest for a stealth attack on a far-flung uranium enrichment plant owned by some conveniently unidentified NATO-threatening entity. As impossible missions go, it makes the Death Star trench attack look like a grocery run — a tough assignment for Maverick’s 12 brilliant but still-untested pilots, played by actors including Lewis Pullman, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez and a terrific Glen Powell as a smug, know-it-all Iceman type. And then there’s the hotheaded Rooster (Miles Teller, sullen as only he can be), whose candidacy is complicated by the fact that his late father was Maverick’s wingman and best friend, Goose (the great Anthony Edwards, seen here in brief shards of footage from the first “Top Gun”). Talk about chickens coming home to roost.

Rooster’s background is a ludicrous contrivance. It’s also the perfect setup for the kind of rich, thorny cross-generational soap opera that — as much as its aspect-ratio-fluctuating flight sequences and its climactic surge of Lady Gaga — is this movie’s reason for being. Those planes may be powered by fuel, but “Top Gun: Maverick” runs on pure, unfiltered dad energy. Try not to smile whenever Cruise’s Maverick flashes a mischievous avuncular grin beneath his helmet and chases his young charges in F/A-18s all over the Mojave Desert, teaching them new moves while wasting no chance to reassert his own superiority. Back on the ground, Maverick and Rooster’s surrogate daddy-son tensions flare into the open, exacerbated by guilt, resentment and their recognition of their shared stubbornness.

The drama might have taken on an intriguingly Oedipal edge if the filmmakers had thought to bring back, say, Meg Ryan as Carole, Goose’s wife and Rooster’s mother. But here, with the exception of Monica Barbaro as one of Maverick’s most gifted proteges, women are few and far between, and even the more prominent ones get mostly perfunctory treatment. With no sign of Kelly McGillis as the Navy instructor who once took Maverick’s breath away, it falls to another flame, Penny (a lovely, underused Jennifer Connelly), to mix a few drinks, provide a flicker of romantic distraction and snuff out the first film’s lingering homoerotic vibes. Not that there are many such whiffs here, and more’s the pity: Kosinski, who previously directed Cruise in the shiny, empty science-fiction drama “Oblivion,” is a skilled craftsman with none of Scott’s horned-up filmmaking energy. (He does salute the original with an opening blast of “Danger Zone” and a rousing game of football in the surf, though the latter is more team-building than steam-building exercise.)

Scott’s admirers may miss that disreputable edge, the unrepentantly vulgar sensibility that made the original “Top Gun” a dreamy, voluptuous hoot. There’s some compensation in Kosinski’s fight and flight sequences, full of face-melting ascents, whiplash-inducing loop-de-loops and other airborne stunts that prove considerably more transporting and immersive than what the first “Top Gun” was able to accomplish. That’s only to be expected, given the more sophisticated hardware involved. Like any proper commercial for the military-industrial complex, “Top Gun: Maverick” teases the latest cutting-edge advances in aeronautics and defense technology, a field that has evolved roughly in step with an ever more digitally subsumed movie industry.

At the same time, thanks to Cruise and Kosinski’s unfashionable insistence on practical filmmaking and their refusal to lean too heavily on computer-generated visual effects, their sequel plays like a throwback in more than one sense. But the era that produced the first film has shifted, and “Top Gun: Maverick” is especially poignant in the ways, both subtle and overt, that it acknowledges the passage of time, the fading of youth and the shifting of its own status as a pop cultural phenomenon. The original was a risky, relatively low-budget underdog that somehow became a perfectly imperfect movie for its moment, soaring on the wings of its dreamy eroticism and recruitment-commercial aesthetics, a mega-hit soundtrack and an incandescent star. It ushered in a new era of decadence for its producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and for the many gung-ho American blockbusters they would keep cranking out.

“Top Gun: Maverick” is a longer, costlier and appreciably weightier affair, and its expanded emotional scope and heightened production values (including a score by the original film’s composer, Harold Faltermeyer) give it a classy, elegiac sheen; it’s like a hot summer diversion in prestige-dinosaur drag, or vice versa. As a rare big-budget Hollywood movie about men and women who fly without capes, it has a lot riding on it. Once set for a summer 2020 release but delayed almost two years by the pandemic, it arrives bearing the hopes and dreams of a tentatively resurgent industry that could use a non-Marvel theatrical hit. And as such, everything about its story — from the intergenerational conflict to the high stakes of Maverick’s mission to the rusted-out F-14s collecting dust at the periphery of the action — carries an unmistakable subtext. Is this movie one of the last gasps of a dying Hollywood empire? Or is its emotionally stirring, viscerally gripping and proudly old-fashioned storytelling the latest adrenaline shot that the industry so desperately needs?

It’s hard to consider any of this apart from Cruise, whose attention-grabbing actions during an earlier phase of the pandemic — shooting a video of himself going to see “Tenet” in a packed London theater , verbally lashing members of his “Mission: Impossible” crew for flouting COVID-19 protocols — suggest a man who’s placed the weight of an entire troubled industry on his own shoulders. His endless search for the perfect action vehicle has sometimes felt like a quest for some elusive fountain of Hollywood youth, and it’s led to gratifying highs ( “Edge of Tomorrow” ) and inexplicable lows ( “The Mummy” ). Like Maverick, to whom someone wise once said, “Son, your ego is writing checks that your body can’t cash,” Cruise just won’t quit, won’t give up, won’t listen to anyone who tells him no. As a sometime fan of Cruise’s egomania, at least when he’s dangling from a helicopter or literally running to catch a plane, I’m not really complaining.

And so there’s some irony and maybe even a hint of self-awareness in the fact that while Cruise owns just about every moment of this movie, another star winds up stealing it. As Iceman, Maverick’s old adversary turned wingman, mentor and ally, Val Kilmer haunts “Top Gun: Maverick” from its earliest moments but enters it surprisingly late, anchoring a perfectly timed, beautifully played scene that kicks the movie into emotional overdrive. Watching Ice as he greets and counsels Maverick, you may find yourself thinking about the actor playing him, about the recent toll on his health and the rickety trajectory of his own post-’80s and ’90s career, subjects that were illuminated by the recent documentary “Val.” In one fictional moment, he gives us something unmistakably, irreducibly real, partly by puncturing the fantasy of human invincibility that his co-star has never stopped trying to sell.

‘Top Gun: Maverick’

Rated: PG-13, for sequences of intense action, and some strong language Running time: 2 hours, 17 minutes Playing: Starts May 27 in general release

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Top Gun: Maverick review: A high-flying sequel gets it right

The need for speed comes with a fresh young cast, but the Cruise control remains.

In Top Gun: Maverick 's opening scene, someone makes the mistake of asking Tom Cruise to take his fighter jet to Mach 9. He pauses, then flashes that megawatt Cheshire grin. Never mind that it's a practice run; there is only one Mach he knows, and it is 10 (or maybe 10.2). That's because he's a maverick, the Maverick — Captain Pete Mitchell of the United States Navy, a rogue's rogue for whom clouds part and Hans Zimmer synths soar.

He's also 36 years older than the cocky young lieutenant he played on screen in the 1986 original , a bare fact that the sequel (in theaters May 27) both elides and celebrates in a movie whose bright stripes and broad strokes feel somehow bombastic and tenderheartedly nostalgic at the same time. Imagine a world where motorcyclists scoff at helmets, all bars burst into jukebox singalongs, and the U.S. military is simply an unblemished agent for good. A few decades ago you didn't have to, because you lived in it; Top Gun: Maverick can because it never left.

Inevitably, a few things have changed: Lady Gaga is on the soundtrack now , and there's a whole new class of lion-cub recruits. But that's still Kenny Loggins' " Danger Zone " chugging over the title credits, and Maverick is still the fastest man alive in an F-14, even if he's never managed to exceed the lowly rank of Captain. "You should be at least a two-star admiral by now, or a Senator," Ed Harris 's Rear Admiral grouses early on, before grudgingly sending him off to the Top Gun base in San Diego. Maverick's constant insubordination and looming obsolescence should have gotten him discharged years ago, he reminds him; instead, he's been saved by an old friend, Iceman ( Val Kilmer ), now an admiral himself.

There's a reason for that intervention: a uranium plant in a heavily guarded secret bunker that needs to be eliminated before it becomes operational for the enemy. (What enemy? Don't ask, don't tell.) And only jets can infiltrate it, if the Academy's ten best recruits can be taught to thread the needle and get out of there alive. Leading the team is Maverick's new job, though the bossman there (a scowling Jon Hamm) is not exactly overjoyed to welcome him — and a promising young pilot called Rooster ( Miles Teller , in a kicky little mustache) even less enthused. That's because Rooster's parents were Goose and Carole (Anthony Edwards and Meg Ryan, who appear only in misty flashbacks), and all he knows is that Pete had something to do with him getting pulled from the fast-track flight program years ago.

Otherwise, Rooster's main rival amongst the new hopefuls is Hangman ( Hidden Figures ' great Glen Powell), a fellow pilot whose smirky antagonism recalls the last movie's Iceman rivalry in everything except the frosted tips (Powell is a more natural kind of blonde, but the square-jawed swagger and resting smug face play the same). Director Joseph Kosinski ( TRON: Legacy ) revels in the sonic-boom rush of their many flight scenes, sending his jets swooping and spinning in impossible, equilibrium-rattling arcs. On the ground, too, his camera caresses every object in its view, almost as if he's making a rippling ad for America itself: The unfurling snap of a boat sail; the gleaming Formica in a desert rest-stop diner; golden bodies playing touch football in the California surf while a magic-hour sun goes down.

That nationalistic glow extends to Maverick's courting of a former paramour, Jennifer Connelly , but there's a bittersweet sentimentality in their reconnection, the kind of unhurried adult romance that doesn't make it on screen much anymore. (A brief interlude with Kilmer, who has largely lost his voice to cancer , is also surprisingly moving.) Kosinksi, of course, has to make his Maverick work with or without the context of the original, and the script, by Peter Craig ( The Batman ) and Justin Marks ( The Jungle Book ) toggles deftly between winking callbacks and standard big-beat action stuff meant to stand on its own. Teller and Powell are breezily appealing, actors at the apex of their youth and beauty, though the movie still belongs in almost every scene to Cruise. At this point in his career, he's not really playing characters so much as variations on a theme — the theme being, perhaps, The Last Movie Star. And in the air up there, he stands alone. Grade: B+

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• The sky's the limit for Top Gun: Maverick hotshot Glen Powell
• Val Kilmer says he feels 'a lot better than I sound' after tracheotomy due to throat cancer

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Top Gun: Maverick

The story involves Maverick confronting his past while training a group of younger Top Gun graduates, including the son of his deceased best friend, for a dangerous mission. The story involves Maverick confronting his past while training a group of younger Top Gun graduates, including the son of his deceased best friend, for a dangerous mission. The story involves Maverick confronting his past while training a group of younger Top Gun graduates, including the son of his deceased best friend, for a dangerous mission.

• Joseph Kosinski
• Jack Epps Jr.
• Peter Craig
• Jennifer Connelly
• Miles Teller
• 4.3K User reviews
• 439 Critic reviews
• 78 Metascore
• 107 wins & 235 nominations total

Top cast 97

• Capt. Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell

• Penny Benjamin

• Lt. Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw

• Adm. Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky

• CWO4 Bernie 'Hondo' Coleman

• Adm. Beau 'Cyclone' Simpson

• Adm. Solomon 'Warlock' Bates

• Lt. Natasha 'Phoenix' Trace

• Lt. Robert 'Bob' Floyd

• Lt. Reuben 'Payback' Fitch

• Lt. Mickey 'Fanboy' Garcia

• Lt. Jake 'Hangman' Seresin

• Lt. Neil 'Omaha' Vikander

• Lt. Billy 'Fritz' Avalone

• Lt. Callie 'Halo' Bassett

• Lt. Javy 'Coyote' Machado

• Lt. Brigham 'Harvard' Lennox

• Lt. Logan 'Yale' Lee
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia At the insistence of Tom Cruise , minimal green screen and CGI aerial shots exist in the film, and even the close up cockpit shots were taken during real in-flight sequences. This meant that much of the cast had to undergo extensive G-force training sessions to withstand the physical demands of G-force pressures during flights.
• Goofs At 1h12'10" Coyote is in G-LOC, releases the stick and his aircraft falls towards the ground. Super-hornet are equipped with auto GCAS (automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System), which would react to the situation and take control to climb and level at a safe altitude with no obstacles.

Rear Admiral : Maverick. Thirty-plus years of service. Combat medals. Citations. Only man to shoot down three enemy planes in the last 40 years.

[Cain looks through pages of Maverick's records]

Rear Admiral : 'Distinguished.' 'Distinguished.' 'Distinguished.' Yet you can't get a promotion, you won't retire, and, despite your best efforts, you refuse to die. You should be at least a two-star admiral by now, if not a senator. Yet here you are: Captain. Why is that?

Maverick : It's one of life's mysteries, sir.

Rear Admiral : This isn't a joke. I asked you a question.

Maverick : I'm where I belong, sir.

Rear Admiral : Well, the navy doesn't see it that way. Not anymore.

Rear Admiral : These planes you've been testing, Captain, one day, sooner or later, they won't need pilots at all. Pilots that need to sleep, eat, take a piss. Pilots that disobey orders. All you did was buy some time for those men out there. The future is coming, and you're not in it.

[Cain faces the officer by the door]

Rear Admiral : Escort this man off the base. Take him to his quarters. Wait with him while he packs his gear. I want him on the road to North Island within the hour.

[surprised look on Maverick's face]

Maverick : North Island, sir?

Rear Admiral : Call came in with impeccable timing, right as I was driving here to ground your ass once and for all. It galls me to say it, but... for reasons known only to the Almighty and your guardian angel, you've been called back to Top Gun.

Maverick : Sir?

Rear Admiral : You are dismissed, Captain.

[Maverick proceeds to leave Cain's office]

Rear Admiral : The end is inevitable, Maverick. Your kind is headed for extinction.

[Maverick turns around]

Maverick : Maybe so, sir. But not today.

• Crazy credits "Top Gun 001: Tom Cruise" is listed among the other pilots who worked on the film.
• Connections Featured in Conan: Tom Cruise (2019)
• Soundtracks Danger Zone From Top Gun (1986) Original Soundtrack Written by Giorgio Moroder & Tom Whitlock Performed by Kenny Loggins Courtesy of Columbia Records By arrangement with Sony Music Entertainment

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• May 27, 2022 (United States)
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• May 29, 2022
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'Top Gun: Maverick' is ridiculous. It's also ridiculously entertaining

Justin Chang

Tom Cruise is back as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick. Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures Corporation hide caption

Tom Cruise is back as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick.

In one of the more memorable lines in the original Top Gun , Maverick gets chewed out by a superior who tells him, "Son, your ego's writing checks your body can't cash."

Sometimes I wonder if Tom Cruise took that putdown as a personal challenge. No movie star seems to work harder or push himself further than Cruise these days. He just keeps going and going, whether he's scaling skyscrapers in a new Mission: Impossible adventure or showing a bunch of fresh-faced pilots how it's done in the ridiculous and ridiculously entertaining Top Gun: Maverick .

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'top gun 2' means one more ride into the danger zone.

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Sorry, tom cruise fans — new 'top gun' and 'mission impossible' movies delayed again.

Cruise was in his early 20s when he first played Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, the cocky young Navy pilot with the aviator sunglasses, the Kawasaki motorcycle and the need for speed. In the sequel, he's as arrogant and insubordinate as ever: Now a Navy test pilot in his late 50s, Maverick still knows how to tick off his superiors, as we see in an exciting opening sequence where he pushes a new plane beyond its limits. Partly as punishment, he's ordered to return to TOPGUN, the elite pilot-training school, and train its best and brightest for an impossibly dangerous new mission.

One of his trainees is a hotheaded young pilot called Rooster, played by Miles Teller. Rooster is the son of Maverick's beloved wingman, Goose, who tragically died while flying with Maverick in the first Top Gun . Maverick's lingering guilt over Goose's death affects his relationship with Rooster; so does his desire to protect Rooster from harm, which generates some suspense over whether he'll end up choosing the young man for the assignment.

And so the three screenwriters of Top Gun: Maverick — including Cruise's regular Mission: Impossible writer-director, Christopher McQuarrie — have taken the threads of the original and spun them into an intergenerational male weepie, a dad movie of truly epic proportions. They're tapping into nostalgia for the original, while aiming for new levels of emotional grandeur. To that end, the soundtrack features a Lady Gaga song, "Hold My Hand." It's nowhere near as iconic a chart topper as the original movie's "Take My Breath Away," but tugs at your heartstrings nonetheless.

Much of the plot is unabashedly derivative of the first Top Gun . Once again, Maverick runs afoul of growling authority figures, here played by Ed Harris and Jon Hamm . Cruise's former co-star Kelly McGillis is nowhere to be seen, but Maverick does get another perfunctory love interest, a bartender named Penny, nicely played by Jennifer Connelly despite the thanklessness of the role.

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Lady gaga, 'hold my hand'.

What's interesting about Top Gun: Maverick is how it isn't like its predecessor, mostly in terms of style. The first Top Gun , directed on a relatively low budget by the late Tony Scott , combined the aesthetics of a military recruitment video with some of the ripest homoerotic imagery ever seen in a major Hollywood movie. For better or worse, the sequel, directed by Joseph Kosinski of Tron: Legacy and Oblivion , is a much tamer, slicker, classier affair. Maverick no longer struts around in towels and tighty-whities, though he can still fly a plane like nobody's business.

The action sequences are much more thrilling and immersive than in the original. You feel like you're really in the cockpit with these pilots, and that's because you are: The actors underwent intense flight training and flew actual planes during shooting. In that respect, Top Gun: Maverick feels like a throwback to a lost era of practical moviemaking, before computer-generated visual effects took over Hollywood. You start to understand why Cruise, the creative force behind the movie, was so driven to make it: In telling a story where older and younger pilots butt heads, and state-of-the-art F-18s duke it out with rusty old F-14s, he's trying to show us that there's room for the old and the new to coexist. He's also advancing a case for the enduring appeal of the movies and their power to transport us with viscerally gripping action and big, sweeping emotions.

Which brings us to the movie's most powerful scene, in which Val Kilmer briefly reprises his role as Iceman, Maverick's former nemesis-turned-friend. Kilmer is, in some respects, Cruise's opposite: a onetime star whose career never quite found its groove, and who's been beset by health issues in recent years, including the loss of his voice due to throat cancer. His soulful presence here gives this high-flying melodrama the grounding it needs. Cruise may be this movie's immortal star, but it's Kilmer's aching performance that takes your breath away.

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Top Gun: Maverick review – Tom Cruise soars in a sequel that’s as thrilling as blockbusters get

There’ll need to be a reckoning over the film’s politics and its treatment of women, but for now... we fist-pump, article bookmarked.

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Dir: Joseph Kosinski. Starring: Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer. 12A, 131 minutes.

Top Gun , released in 1986, might be the most effective and insidious military recruitment ad ever made. Bolstered by the shuddering synths of Harold Faltermeyer’s score and a lifetime’s supply of high fives, Tony Scott’s fighter pilot fever dream represented an amoral, apolitical ideal of navy life. The enemy was unnamed. The war was barely defined. Here, a true brotherhood could be built on nothing but brass balls and good vibes. And a man could sit in a cockpit and feel like he could climb past where Icarus fell. According to the actual US Navy, Top Gun resulted in a 500 per cent boost to their recruitment rates in the year after its release.

One day, there’ll need to be a reckoning over what exactly these films do and who they benefit. But, for now, there’s another truth that’s hard to swerve: the belated follow-up Top Gun: Maverick is as thrilling as blockbusters get. It’s the kind of edge-of-your-seat, fist-pumping spectacular that can unite an entire room full of strangers sitting in the dark and leave them with a wistful tear in their eye.

The film is a true legacy sequel. In the tradition of Star Wars: The Force Awakens , it’s a carefully reconstructed clone of its predecessor, tooled not only to reflect changing tastes and attitudes, but the ascendancy of its star Tom Cruise to a level of fame that borders on the mythological. Do we still think of Cruise as a man these days, or as an idea?

In Maverick ’s opening scenes, we reunite with his character Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, now head of a programme that tests high-altitude, hypersonic reconnaissance planes. He’s about to be shut down, his pilots replaced with drones. The only way he can save the day is if he can hit 10 times the speed of sound in his next test run. Anyone who knows the old Maverick will not only predict whether or not he can pull it off, but also if he’ll decide to push things a little too far. After he crash-lands, he strides into some rustic-looking diner, covered head-to-toe in ash. The most gee-whiz kid you’ve ever seen gazes up at him in awe (place your bets now on whether he joins the navy when he grows up).

But people do change, and this Maverick is a man haunted by his past. The military may have cleared him of responsibility, but he’ll never shake the feeling that his own bravado caused the death of his best friend Goose during a routine training exercise. In Top Gun , it humbled him. Here, his feelings are less clear-cut and all the more interesting for it. He’s so eager to put himself in harm’s way that it almost seems like a death wish. He’s also suffocatingly protective of Goose’s son, Bradley, otherwise known as Rooster ( Miles Teller ). Maverick tried to block his path into flight school. Rooster bitterly resents him for it. When Maverick is called in to train naval recruits in what, on paper, comes across as an impossible mission – hint hint, there’s a generous dollop of Ethan Hunt in this film – their relationship becomes all the more fraught.

Due to the practical limitations of the time, Top Gun ’s original dog fights were robust but always a little hard to follow. Here, they’re the true meat-and-bones of the film – breathtakingly balletic, and grounded in the increasingly rare pleasure of the tangible. Cruise and his co-stars sit in actual cockpits. The aerial stunts are (mostly, at least) real. It’s a true feat for director Joseph Kosinski to make something this ambitious look this effortless. He also works enough in the language and tone of Cruise’s recent collaborations with Christopher McQuarrie (the screenwriter of Edge of Tomorrow and the last two Mission: Impossibles) that Maverick plays as much as a Top Gun film as it does a Cruise film. And, as can be expected now, the star attacks the movie with such dedication that it completely outsizes every single element around him.

Fortunately, that does a good job of hiding quite how much Top Gun: Maverick is structured like Top Gun . Entire sequences – including the “Highway to the Danger Zone”-soundtracked opening of jets taking off – are lifted wholesale from the original film. The new recruits are roughly reshaped versions of the old characters: we’ve got a new Iceman in Glen Powell’s Hangman (he finds just the right level of assholery for the role), while Monica Barbaro’s Phoenix is, like Kelly McGillis’s Charlie before her, the one woman on the base with any lines. This time, at least, she gets to be one of the pilots. Rooster isn’t really like his dad, but he does dress just like him – right down to the sunglasses and the unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt.

But Top Gun: Maverick really isn’t packed with the kind of craven nostalgia that we’re used to these days. It’s smarter, subtler, and wholly more humanistic. Kosinski allows space for Val Kilmer’s Iceman, whose rivalry with Maverick was so integral to the original, to be celebrated, without the film cruelly papering over the loss of Kilmer’s voice due to cancer.

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The film, unfortunately, doesn’t extend as much of a loving hand toward the women of Top Gun – neither McGillis nor Meg Ryan, who played Rooster’s mother, make any kind of return. Maverick, instead, gets a new love interest in the form of Jennifer Connelly’s Penny, the admiral’s daughter offhandedly mentioned in the first film, now a bar owner and a single mother. Again, there’ll come a time when we need to talk about why Hollywood only accepts older women who look a certain way. Until then, who can be blamed for getting swept up by a film this damned fun?

‘Top Gun: Maverick’ is in cinemas from 25 May

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Review: Tom Cruise's excellent 'Top Gun: Maverick' takes to the skies, sticks to the formula

The long-awaited aerial extravaganza “Top Gun: Maverick” knows its audience extremely well and wastes no time getting to business – which means cranking up Kenny Loggins’ classic “Danger Zone” and turning on the sweet sounds of fighter jet engines.

Gen Xers may get forgotten about from time to time, but  Tom Cruise looks out for the 1980s kids who’ve been waiting 36 years for this thing. In the opening moments of director Joseph Kosinski’s excellently macho follow-up (★★★½ out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters Friday), you don't know if you’re watching the original 1986 “Top Gun” or a new one.  

Unlike its title character, "Maverick" knows how to stick to a plan: This movie not just drips nostalgia but hoses fans down with it, doling out quality man hugs, shirtless beach sports, bar singalongs, snappy one-liners, an endless supply of Ray-Bans and Cruise reaffirming his status as an ageless wonder.

'Let's light the fires': Tom Cruise arrives by helicopter for world premiere of 'Top Gun: Maverick'

The iconic action hero returns as Pete Mitchell (call sign “Maverick”), an ace aviator and Navy captain who’s reminded he should be at least a two-star admiral by now but hasn’t changed his rogue attitude much in the last three decades. We’re reintroduced to Maverick pushing the boundaries of physics and his bosses’ buttons when his program as a test pilot is scrapped and he's reassigned to San Diego's Top Gun flight school as an instructor.

Immediately, he rubs his new commander, Cyclone (Jon Hamm back in irritable Don Draper mode), the wrong way, yet there’s a very important task at hand: An enemy uranium facility is about to come online and Maverick needs to test and weed out the best of the best young Top Gun graduates to find a team to take the place out. (And like in the first film, it’s purposefully fuzzy which country we’re attacking.)

The seriousness of this rather impossible mission is made more personally fraught when one of the flyboys turns out to be Rooster ( Miles Teller ), the son of Maverick’s late wingman Goose. Rooster has good reason to be irked at Maverick’s presence, and the only thing that wipes the usual smirk off Maverick’s face is the guilt he still holds over the death of his best friend, so those two need to work out a lot of their feels.

Summer movie preview: 10 must-see films, from 'Top Gun: Maverick' to 'Thor: Love and Thunder'

As insanely cool as the aerial dogfight scenes were in the original, the sequel’s action sequences level them up with unreal camera angles and nonstop tension. Kosinski aims to make moviegoers feel what it’s like to have your head squished by gG-forces and wonder where in the blue blazes the bad guys are coming from. Toss in the unmistakable Harold Faltermeyer theme and it’s like you’re 10 years old again, watching Maverick rule the air the first time around.

Cruise finds new ways to add depth to his signature character (sorry, Ethan Hunt) without sacrificing any of his essential qualities. Jennifer Connelly plays Maverick’s love interest, Penny, an old flame who grounds our hero, and Teller, with his best turn since “Whiplash,” factors in as a worthy emotional foil, though the movie falls probably one Maverick/Rooster conversation short of really nailing that core relationship.

Glen Powell: New 'Top Gun' flyboy talks Tom Cruise

Original “Top Gun” star Val Kilmer returns in heartwarming fashion as Iceman – if there’s one scene that really takes your breath away, it’s his – though his spiritual successor arrives in the delightfully cocky Hangman ( Glen Powell ), a tanned and toothpick-chewing piece of work aiming to be mission leader. The rest of the young aviators – including Phoenix (Monica Barbaro) and her co-pilot Bob (Lewis Pullman) – are a mixed bag of character development but at least everybody gets a moment in the air dogfighting and on the sand with a game of beach football, less a team-building exercise than a parade of sunglasses and ripped abs.

'Top Gun: Maverick' first reactions: Tom Cruise is 'our greatest movie star' in 2022's 'best film'

Sure, “Maverick” ideally would be less formulaic – and for the record, it doesn’t quite match the magic of the OG “Top Gun.” At the same time, this kind of movie isn’t made anymore, making it a novelty to younger eyes who haven’t had the gung-ho patriotic pleasure. But the template just works, even when throwing in a Lady Gaga song for extra dramatic gusto.

Whether you’re feeling the need for speed for the first time or haven’t lost that loving feeling since ’86, the Danger Zone is still a pretty spectacular place to visit.

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Top Gun: Maverick Reviews

It is generally said that the second parts are not good, however, Top Gun Maverick is fortunately an exception to this rule, it is even considered that in terms of the level of action and intrigue it may even be superior...

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Aug 21, 2024

After 36 years, Tom Cruise returns as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell and proved to fans (and critics) of the first Top Gun that a long-awaited sequel can be entertaining, deserved, and of high quality.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 23, 2024

It’s a good thing it looks good ... because the plot is bare-thin.

Full Review | Jul 16, 2024

Top Gun: Maverick is the rare legacy sequel that eclipses the original in every way possible, thanks to mind-blowing action and great character growth.

Full Review | Original Score: 9.5/10 | Jul 12, 2024

“Top Gun: Maverick,” if anything, proves that old-school big-budget blockbuster cinema that takes itself seriously isn’t just sorely missing from the yearly cinematic roster but still has the power to stand on its own.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 9, 2024

Ohh right this is what movies used to be like.

Full Review | Apr 24, 2024

Top Gun: Maverick is the reason why I go to the movies and why Tom Cruise is the biggest movie star in the world. WHAT. A RIDE.

Full Review | Sep 27, 2023

Maverick dished out generous amounts of bromance, action, and a truly-immersive narrative in swashbuckling style, and Cruise’s iconic grin was still the greatest thing to take away from it.

Full Review | Sep 13, 2023

It is all of the flying sequences that are shot in such a way that it makes the moviegoer feel like they are a passenger that gives the movie its energy and makes it so much fun.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Aug 9, 2023

Top Gun: Maverick is a surprising stunner crafted with pure adrenaline and kerosene.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 29, 2023

Tom Cruise might save cinema.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

SPECTACULAR! One of the best cinematic experiences I have truly ever had in a theater. Heartfelt, exhilarating & down right emotional. Tom Cruise turns in one of his best performances & Top Gun 2 becomes one of his best films in his Career.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

The return of pure, nostalgic blockbusters. The best aerial action sequences ever amaze even the highest expectations, not only due to the absolutely insane real stunts but largely because of the flawless contribution of all filmmaking elements.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 25, 2023

The final scenes are truly nail biting, with intense flight sequences that result in Tom Cruise’s cast members going from nearly unknown performers, to A-list stars in a matter of minutes.

Top Gun: Maverick is the rare sequel that elevates its source material and creates a new, worthwhile story. A high-octane thrill ride that celebrates where Maverick's been and where he’s going.

The film is pure ideology, pure militarism, generic, and like the first Top Gun in 1986, undemanding.

Full Review | Mar 16, 2023

Women in Top Gun: Maverick don’t see much development, but written dialogue and camerawork treat them with respect.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Mar 6, 2023

There’s no reason in the world it should have worked, but it does.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Feb 21, 2023

A movie-movie with an old-school movie star, this actioner is best seen in theatres, where the dazzling fighter-jet sequences will make you dizzy.

Full Review | Feb 10, 2023

All of these elements come together to form one of the biggest third acts in recent cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Feb 10, 2023

• Entertainment
• The New <i>Top Gun</i> Is So Much Better Than the First One

The New Top Gun Is So Much Better Than the First One

I t no longer matters whether you like or dislike Tom Cruise : no matter how good he looks in his ultra-moisturized, deal-with-the-devil skin, his ship has sailed not just into the waters of middle age, but beyond them. Always a performer desperate to be liked, Cruise has entered a new era, one of potential irrelevance, which could be the best thing that’s ever happened to him. In a world where we’re all either captivated or annoyed by TikTok , freaked out about global warming and the loss of a woman’s right to choose , and trying to coax recalcitrant relatives into getting vaccinated, it’s not even worth the effort to dislike him. And that, if you’re a person who has never liked Tom Cruise, frees you to enjoy the myriad over-the-top pleasures of Top Gun: Maverick.

Top Gun: Maverick , directed by Joseph Kosinski, is a much better film than its predecessor was, and much better than it needs to be overall. Tony Scott’s 1986 jockstrap of a movie about hotshot Naval pilots—produced by fast-lane Hollywood players Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, who perhaps bear more responsibility for its numbnuts machismo than Scott does—is a caveman relic that has achieved enduring popularity, a high-fiving fantasy populated with dude bros before we even had a name for them. In the ’80s, we went to Jim Jarmusch movies to get away from these guys.

Yet it’s easy to make peace with the 2022 version of these men, Cruise included. Top Gun: Maverick takes place in a world where no one seems to be all that worried about the threat to modern masculinity. One of the pilots in the current gang happens to be a woman (she’s played by Monica Barbaro), but even if that’s a significant departure from the 1986 movie, made at a time when women weren’t allowed to fly in combat, it’s still beside the point. Without ridiculing or diminishing them, Top Gun: Maverick allows its male characters to have doubts and insecurities, to fear that maybe they can’t be the best, to worry about being too old to matter. At one point Ed Harris, playing a crusty admiral in a cameo role that nods to The Right Stuff, one of the truly great movies of the ’80s, practically snarls at Cruise, playing aging whippersnapper Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, for disobeying orders: “The future is coming, and you’re not in it.” Even if this is cartoon anxiety about being sent out to pasture, it still counts. Every generation gets the feeling of creeping obsolescence it deserves.

And Maverick is feeling it. Never having achieved a rank higher than Captain, knowing that climbing the ranks would only ground him, he’s been working as a test pilot for the Navy: in an early sequence, he gets his Chuck Yeager moment, climbing into a plane that’s like a space bird and pushing both it and himself to the limit. What has he got to lose? But it turns out that that proverbial one last job is waiting for him: His old friend and rival Iceman ( Val Kilmer , whose inability to speak has been deftly written into the role), who is now officially a big gun, has called him in to train a group of youngsters for an almost impossible mission. They’ll have to guide their planes through—not above—a twisty canyon, flying at dangerously low altitudes, with the goal of taking out an enemy airstrip and bunker. Jealous Navy dude and uptight authority figure Cyclone (Jon Hamm) doesn’t think Maverick is up to the task, which of course means he can’t turn it down.

So Maverick returns to the place where it all started, the Top Gun training site known as Miramar, a.k.a. Fightertown U.S.A. He makes the move, apparently, on his motorcycle, with nothing more than his trademark patch-adorned leather jacket on his back. Who needs a U-Haul full of sofas, toaster ovens, and pants and T-shirts when you can just jump, unhelmeted, on your bike and go? Even before his first day on the job, he encounters his 12 recruits as they whoop it up at the local watering hole, which happens to be run by an old flame, Penny (Jennifer Connelly), mentioned in passing in the first movie but now a woman, and a character, with a life of her own. She has a daughter; she loves to sail. In one scene, she gets Maverick out on her boat, where she navigates staunchly at the tiller while Maverick clings tentatively to a railing behind her. Isn’t he supposed to be in the Navy, she asks him? “I don’t sail boats, Penny,” he informs her. “I land on them.”

Thar she blows—wit! Or what passes for it when Cruise is doing the talking. But Maverick is dead-serious when he’s training his pilots, a group he must narrow down to six for the mission. The crew of eager aspirants include Phoenix (Barbaro), whose presence the guys accept, correctly, as no big deal; arrogant Hangman (Glen Powell), toothpick hanging from his mouth with the devil-may-care insouciance of a guy who saw a movie once; and, most significantly, Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s old flight partner and best friend Goose (played in the earlier movie by Anthony Edwards), who died during a training maneuver—a loss Maverick has never gotten over, and one he still feels responsible for, even though the Navy has absolved him.

There’s understandable tension between Maverick and Rooster. Rooster wants to charge forward at life; Maverick, though he can barely admit it, would prefer to hold him back just to protect him. This is the central conflict of Top Gun: Maverick, one that’s resolved in the movie’s multilayered and, typically for Cruise, over-the-top climax.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

If you haven’t already read a million things about how Top Gun: Maverick was made, and how solemnly Cruise accepted this mission, don’t start now. It’s not really worth it, and it could dull your joy in the fact that this is, at the very least, a feat of old-fashioned action moviemaking, light on CGI, and favoring human beings actually moving and planes actually flying. (Bruckheimer is, incidentally, one of the film’s producers. Simpson died in 1996.) The flying sequences are divine, sometimes tense and sometimes rapturously freeing, and they feel realistic because they’re minimally touched by CGI. (Cruise is an experienced pilot, and got extra training from the Navy on top of that; his fellow actors learned to fly as well.) But even its more casual sequences show definitive flair: at one point Cruise and the younger pilots, all in beachwear, cavort in the surf during a rowdy game of dogfight football. The sun glints off the men’s water-dappled pecs; their aviator sunglasses hide their inevitable squinting. Bruce Weber could have done it better, but Kosinsky—who has made two previous features, the 2010 Tron: Legacy and the 2012 sci-fi drama Oblivion, also starring Cruise—pulls it off even so.

It may be damning Cruise with faint praise to call him tolerable in Top Gun: Maverick. But even if he’s just playing at the indignity of aging rather than truly feeling it, he’s at least attempting to be less of a hologram and more a facsimile of a human. Early in Top Gun: Maverick, he sits at Penny’s bar by himself, looking on as the younger pilots swig their beers, taunt one another, argue with good or ill humor about who’s the best pilot. His gaze—affectionate, a little wistful—signals that he knows what’s coming for him, sooner rather than later. But first, to show these kids he’s still got it. Love Tom Cruise or hate him, he’s the only one we’ve got; his particular set of qualities have no equal. The day he stops needing to prove himself will be like the day a lion loses the will to roar. And only a cruel person would rejoice in that.

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“Top Gun: Maverick,” Reviewed: Tom Cruise Takes Empty Thrills to New Heights

When Ronald Reagan was elected President, in 1980, it seemed only slightly more absurd than if Ronald McDonald had won. Both were entertainers, but the burger clown knew it, whereas Reagan believed the nostalgic and noxious verities of the movies that he had appeared in—and as a politician he attempted to force modern American life to conform to them. Thus “Top Gun,” which I saw when it came out, in 1986, felt like the cultural nadir of a time that was itself something of a nadir. As a film of cheaply rousing drama and jingoistic nonsense, “Top Gun” played like feedback—a shrill distillation of the very world view that it reproduced. Little did we know that there was another, less accomplished yet more bilious entertainer waiting in the wings to wreak even more grievous damage, more than three decades later, on the polity and the national psyche.

No less than the original “Top Gun,” its new sequel, “Top Gun: Maverick,” directed by Joseph Kosinski, is an emblem of its benighted political times. That’s why, in comparison with the sequel, the original comes off as a work of warmhearted humanism. Yet, paradoxically, and disturbingly, “Maverick” is also a more satisfying drama, a more accomplished action film—I enjoyed it more, yet its dosed-out, juiced-up pleasures reveal something terrifying about the implications and the effects of its narrative efficiency.

“Maverick” is less a sequel to “Top Gun” than a renovation of it. The framework of the story is borrowed from the original, nearly scene for scene; drastic changes, while updating it for the present time, leave it recognizable still. In the new film, Tom Cruise returns as Lieutenant Pete Mitchell, whose call sign is Maverick. Now he’s a test pilot at an isolated post in the Mojave Desert, where the project he’s working on—the development of a new airplane—is about to be cancelled in favor of drones, on the pretext of a performance standard that can’t be met. So Maverick, defying an admiral’s order, takes the plane airborne and, against all odds and at grave personal danger, pushes it past Mach 10 (which, for the record, is more than seven thousand miles per hour), thus temporarily saving the project but also risking court martial. Instead, Maverick is sent back to Fighter Weapons School, a.k.a., Top Gun—of which he is, of course, a graduate—in San Diego, summoned by the academy’s commanding officer, Admiral Tom (Iceman) Kazansky, his classmate and respected rival in the first film (again played by Val Kilmer). Maverick’s assignment is to train a dozen young ace pilots for a top-secret and crucial mission, to fly into a mountainous region in an unnamed “rogue” state and destroy a subterranean uranium-enrichment plant.

Yet soon another admiral, Beau (Cyclone) Simpson, played by Jon Hamm, sidelines Maverick and changes the mission’s parameters. In response, Maverick steals another plane and undertakes another unauthorized and dangerous flight, thereby justifying his own set of parameters to Cyclone—who orders him back to lead the younger flyers. Yet Maverick has history with one of those flyers, Lieutenant Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), call sign Rooster, whose late father, Nick (Goose) Bradshaw, played by Anthony Edwards, was Maverick’s wingman in the original “Top Gun” and died saving Maverick’s life. There’s more to that history (spoiler), but the dramatic point is that Maverick has to overcome both the distrust and the enmity of one of the best pilots he’s training—for the sake of the mission, the unit’s esprit de corps, Rooster’s peace of mind, and his own sense of responsibility for a fatherless young man for whom he assumed paternal responsibilities.

There’s also a romance, perhaps the most perfunctory one this side of a children’s movie. Like the one in the original “Top Gun,” it is centered on a bar. This time, Maverick re-meets cute a former lover named Penny (Jennifer Connelly), the owner of the bar where the pilots all hang out. (In the original “Top Gun,” there’s mention of a woman named Penny as one of Maverick’s romantic partners, but the hint goes undeveloped.) What it takes for them to get back together is a kind of barroom hazing that costs Maverick money and dignity, plus a jaunt on her sailboat where she literally teaches him the ropes. (As to what happened between him and Charlie, his instructor and lover in the first film, played by Kelly McGillis, the new film says not a word.) Their relationship is the hollow core around which the movie is modelled, and its emptiness comes off not as accidental or oblivious but as the self-conscious dramatic strategy of the director and the film’s group of screenwriters.

The first ten minutes of “Top Gun”—showing the midair freakout of a pilot called Cougar (John Stockwell)—contain more real emotion than the entire running time of the sequel, and therein lie the key differences between the two films. The powerful feelings, troubled circumstances, and unsettling ambiguities in the original posed dramatic challenges that its director, Tony Scott, and its screenwriters never met. Their film thrusted a handful of significant complexities onto the screen but never explored or resolved them. It wasn’t only Cougar who fell apart in “Top Gun.” Maverick himself, racked with guilt over Goose’s death, first attempted to quit the Navy and then, returning to combat duty, froze up in midair. Of course, Maverick quickly got over it (thanks to Goose’s dog tags), and his suddenly resurgent heroic skills saved the day, brought the movie to a quick triumph, and aroused three decades of impatience for a sequel—but his vulnerability and fallibility at least made a daunting appearance.

By contrast, “Maverick” allows for no such doubts or hesitations. There’s certainly danger in the film, including a pilot who passes out midair and needs to be rescued. Maverick himself ends up in some perilous straits. But none of these situations suggests any weakness or failure of will, any questioning of the mission or of the pilots’ own abilities. The challenges are visceral rather than psychological, technical rather than dramatic, and the script offers them not resolutions but merely solutions—ones that are as impersonal as putting a key in a lock and as gratifying as hearing it click open. “Maverick” feels less written and directed than engineered. It is a work that achieves a certain sort of perfection, a perfect substancelessness—which is a deft way of making its forceful, and wildly political, implicit subject matter pass unnoticed.

Again, comparison with the original is telling. Whatever else the original “Top Gun” is, it’s a movie of procedure. The astounding upside-down maneuver with which Maverick flaunts his daring and prowess early on isn’t a violation of rules, just a departure from textbook methods. On another flight, he does break the rules, in relatively minor ways—he goes briefly below the “hard deck” (the lower limit) to win a competition and then playfully buzzes officers in a tower—and gets seriously called on the carpet for it. By contrast, in the sequel Maverick openly defies the orders of his superior officers, and not merely for a quick maneuver or a playful twit—he steals two planes, and destroys one of them. (For that matter, the destruction is kept offscreen and is merely played for laughs.) The essence of “Maverick” is that a naval officer breaks the law but gets away with it, because he and he alone can save the country from imminent danger.

The lawbreaker-as-hero model rings differently in an age of Trumpian politics and practices, of open insurrection and a near-coup. “Maverick” is evidence, as strong as any in the political arena, that the Overton window of authoritarianism has shifted. This is apparent in the movie’s cavalier attitude toward the rule of law, even in the seemingly sacrosanct domain of military discipline. In the original “Top Gun,” Maverick and the other pilots are told, by the instructor Viper (Tom Skerritt), “Now, we don’t make policy here, gentlemen. Elected officials, civilians do that. We are the instruments of that policy.” (Yes, “gentlemen”—all the fliers in the original are men.) In “Maverick,” there is no parallel line of dialogue, and the military is hermetically sealed off from any reference to politics—perhaps because such sentiments would likely now, in many parts of the country, be booed.

In “Top Gun,” Maverick is a warrior who needs to master his emotions in order to serve his country and to protect his colleagues. In the new film, Maverick, nearing sixty, succeeds solely by giving in to his emotions, by expressly not controlling them—and this, above all, is the doctrine that he imparts to young pilots: “Don’t think, just do.” That mantra, which his best students repeat back to him and follow, is a strange perversion of a key phrase that the young Maverick, explaining himself in class, blurts out in “Top Gun”: “You don’t have time to think up there; if you think, you’re dead.” There’s a world of difference between the young Maverick’s nearly apologetic instrumentalizing of instinct and the elder Maverick’s exaltation of unthinking action. This key line—which, following the quotability of the original film, seems devised to become a catchphrase—isn’t limited to flying and fighting but is delivered as a dictum that could as easily be echoed by anyone with anything to do anywhere.

Thinking means reflecting on consequences and contexts, going past immediate desires and appearances to consider causes and implications. Not thinking is easy for the characters in “Maverick,” because they have no individual attributes at all. The pilots and the officers are played by a diverse group of actors, but the screenwriters give them identities outside of their military actions and no backstories beside the ones that issue from the original “Top Gun.” In the entire film, not a single event or idea or experience is discussed that doesn’t specifically relate to the plot. As a result, the stars and the supporting cast alike have little to do and are reduced to flattened emblems of themselves. Yet the reduction of the characters to cipher-like mechanical functions is part of the charm of “Maverick,” thrusting into the foreground the many extended sequences of high-risk flight, and rendering them more dramatically characterized than anything that takes place on the ground. Also, these airborne scenes far outshine the ones in “Top Gun,” because they are filmed largely from the point of view of the pilots, looking out through the front of the cockpit into the onrush of other planes and in the face of looming and menacing obstacles. They are some of the most impressive and exciting—and strikingly simple—action sequences that I’ve seen in a while.

Apparently, the flight scenes in “Maverick” were realized in actual planes in flight, and the cameras in the cockpits were wielded by the actors themselves. Cruise, who famously enjoys doing his own stunts, supposedly trained his castmates in the requisite skills of aerial cinematography. I wouldn’t have guessed any of this, though, if I hadn’t read the publicity materials in which Cruise and others say so. The scenes of pilots in flight are cut into rapid fragments that reduce aerial views to mere moments of excitement. They are interspersed with aggrandizing grunt-and-sweat closeups of the actors, especially Cruise. This amounts to a kind of malpractice in the editing room, transforming the actors’ brave and devoted exertions into a seeming cheat, an ersatz experience that might as well have been created with C.G.I.

What’s most impressive about “Top Gun: Maverick” is its speed—not the speed of the planes in flight but the speed with which the movie dashes in a straight line from its opening act to its conclusion. The flights at the center of the film are vertiginously twisty, but the drama is a bullet train on a rigid track. Both midair and on the ground, Kosinski is an approximator. He doesn’t let his eye get distracted by the piquant detail, and he doesn’t turn his head to overhear a stray confidence or an incidental remark. He’s narrowly focussed on the relentless course of the action, and incurious about its byways, its implications, its material or emotional realities. He keeps the drama as abstract as the military software and as inhuman as the military hardware that are the movie’s true protagonists. I repeat: I enjoyed it, and you might, too—if you don’t think, just watch.

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'Top Gun: Maverick' Review: Smash Hit Tom Cruise Sequel Streaming in December

You'll feel the need for speed in this box office smash sequel to the '80s classic, streaming on Paramount Plus in time for the holidays.

Tom Cruise takes to the skies in Top Gun: Maverick with Miles Teller and Val Kilmer.

Welcome back to the danger zone. You might not think 2022 needed a sequel to the most '80s movie ever, but Top Gun: Maverick is way more wildly entertaining than it has any right to be. Top Gun 2 reboots the original film's heart-pounding aerial action, infectiously cheesy character drama and don't-think-too-hard-about-it military fetishism in a winning spectacle of cinematic escapism.

It's been more than 35 years since the release of the original Top Gun, in which Tom Cruise employed his widest grin as a US Navy aviator with a point to prove and a childlike delight in playing with high-speed toys (which just happen to be built for killing people, but whatever). Having smashed over a billion dollars in theaters, it's available now in digital stores, on 4K Blu-ray and on DVD (so that's your dad's Christmas present sorted). Top Gun: Maverick will also stream on Paramount Plus from Dec. 22.

Cruise reportedly resisted a sequel for decades, but it turns out if you wait long enough, a story presents itself. He returns to the cockpit as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, still feeling the need for speed no matter what the top brass says. And now, enough time has passed since his co-pilot Goose's death in the original film for Goose's son to be a fully grown man.

Played by Miles Teller , the son is a chip off the old chock, flying with the Navy under the callsign Rooster. When Maverick is called in to train the next generation of cocky kids for a Dambusters-meets-Death-Star suicide mission, the pair are locked onto an intercept course. "And we're off," one character wryly observes of Maverick's anti-authoritarian antics, but he could be talking about the full-tilt re-creation of the original film's glossy thrills. 

Who plays Rooster in Top Gun 2? Miles Teller is the next generation of cocky cockpit jockey.

From the moment you hear the instantly recognizable tolling of the synth bell in Harold Faltermeyer's stirring Top Gun Anthem, it's like the past 30 years never happened. The opening credits describe Maverick, like the original, as a Don Simpson / Jerry Bruckheimer production, even though Simpson died in 1996. The opening text caption explaining the concept of the US Navy's Fighter Weapons School uses the same wording as the first film. And throughout, director Joseph Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda faithfully re-create the late Tony Scott's cinematic style, from a backlit bustling flight deck to ramrod-straight silhouettes arrayed in a hangar. This new version even begins by dropping you into the controlled chaos of an aircraft carrier flight deck with a shot-for-shot re-creation of the first film's iconic intro (probably).

This flight deck sequence has zero connection to what comes after, but it's still a pretty great introduction, instantly immersing you in the familiar feel of a film you may have seen many times or may not have seen for years. More importantly, it feels real , the film setting out its stall from the very beginning: It's about real stuff, like fighter planes and sailboats and proper old-fashioned stunts, not fake stuff like drones and phones and computer-generated spectacle. The marketing makes a big deal out of how the actors really went up in planes, and while there's doubtless a ton of invisible CGI -- as in every film, whether you notice it or not -- almost every shot at least feels like it was done for real. Unlike recent blockbusters (ahem, Marvel movies) which distance you from the action with clearly impossible camera angles and over-the-top CG effects, Top Gun: Maverick uses the visual language of the original, the camera jammed claustrophobically into a cockpit or shaking as it struggles to keep up with a jet screaming past.

Making this explicit connection to such a beloved movie is a risk, of course. The first film was crammed with iconic moments and quotes, and the sequel does little more than rearrange the planes on the flight deck. Still, it's pretty restrained with the catchphrases and callbacks. Yes, Maverick's leather jacket and motorbike get their own theme tune. But the fighter jets and aircraft carriers furnished by the United States Navy aren't the only formidable weapons deployed by the sequel: The toppest gun in the Top Gun arsenal is Cruise's still-explosive charisma.

While the flick again pushes credulity with its deification of Maverick and his godlike flying abilities, Cruise's secret weapon is always his willingness to look silly. So the over-the-top action is balanced with appealing humor and even a little pathos in Cruise's relationship with the younger flyers and his rekindled romance with a bar owner. She's played by Jennifer Connelly , another star who rose in the 1980s (check out who's singing on the jukebox when she first turns up). With Connelly as his old flame and Teller as his surrogate son, Cruise's aging Maverick provides just enough heart to keep things moving as he grapples with the prospect of keeping his feet on the ground permanently. A bittersweet scene reuniting Cruise with the original film's co-star, an ailing Val Kilmer, is also a touching and surprisingly funny moment.

Take to the skies in Top Gun: Maverick.

There's no disguising that a lot of the story is a rerun of the original. For example, Cruise takes the Kelly McGillis role, just for fun. But somehow, despite the fact it's all geared toward a life-or-death mission, the stakes don't feel as immediate as they did the first time around. The original film was fueled by the sense Maverick was genuinely dangerous to the people around him, but this new model doesn't capture the same headlong rush into the danger zone. Partly because the younger models look more like, well, models, rather than warriors. But the main problem is that the mission is so improbably specific to the needs of the plot. The G-force of narrative silliness will start to crush your brain, especially when a late-stage twist fires the afterburners and jets into absurdity that might tempt you to eject.

There are certainly reasons not to like a film like this, whether it's Cruise's personal life or the film's unquestioning attitude to war. Matthew Modine and Bryan Adams were among the '80s stars who declined to be involved in the original because of its jingoistic tone, which was a post-Vietnam reassertion of American military (and masculine) might. Even Cruise dodged a sequel because he didn't want to glorify war. Oddly, Top Gun: Maverick is so bloodless and untroubled by ambiguity it barely feels like a war film. It's just boys with toys.

There's a vague subplot about Jon Hamm's pencil neck in the tower caring that the pilots complete the mission and not so much about them coming back alive, but that only makes the flick's explicit disdain for unmanned combat drones somewhat confusing. In fact, a much truer Top Gun sequel was actually made a few years ago: Good Kill, in which Ethan Hawke plays a Cruise-esque fighter pilot exiled to drone duty, losing his mind in a metal box in the Las Vegas desert as he presses a button and kills civilians thousands of miles away .

Top Gun: Maverick, meanwhile, doesn't even tell us who Tom's fighting against. There's an unnamed faceless adversary, black-helmeted bogeys and boogeymen, stripped of sovereignty or even humanity. The eternal enemy, somewhere out there, doing vaguely defined bad-sounding things that need to be blown up by missiles and helicopters and aircraft carriers. Your tax dollars at work.

But who cares about that? This isn't Saving Private Ryan, this is Top Gun. Ask not for whom the synth bell tolls, because the synth bell tolls for anyone who loves a great popcorn action movie that's as enjoyable as it is ridiculous. Top Gun: Maverick is a blast. The film keeps insisting this is Maverick's last post, but this polished action movie powerhouse is a fun way to fly into the sunset. 

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Top gun 3: confirmation, cast & everything we know about the maverick sequel.

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The latest top gun 3 news, top gun 3 is confirmed, top gun 3 cast, top gun 3 story.

• Top Gun 3: Further News & Info
• Top Gun 3 is confirmed, and the success of Top Gun: Maverick is perhaps the biggest reason for the third film.
• While the cast for Top Gun 3 is uncertain, Tom Cruise will return as Captain Pete "Maverick" Mitchell with Miles Teller as Hangman and Glen Powell as Rooster.
• No details about the story have been revealed, but it could see the Top Gun team flying to prove they are better than drone pilots.

Top Gun 3 was an inevitability after Tom Cruise's triumphant return in Top Gun: Maverick, and the future of the Top Gun franchise and a third movie is becoming clearer. 36 years after Top Gun became a cultural phenomenon Tom Cruise reprised one of his most iconic roles, Captain Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, in Top Gun: Maverick . Maverick reignited the audience's passion for Captain Pete Mitchell, and the demand for Top Gun 3 was instant.

Top Gun: Maverick's cast brought Captain Mitchell back to Fightertown, USA, to train a new generation of pilots claiming to be "the best of the best." With breathtaking aerial photography and steeped in nostalgia for the original Top Gun, Maverick brought Pete Mitchell into the modern era full throttle. Top Gun: Maverick performed swimmingly at the box office, being one of the biggest breakout hits of 2022 and making $1.4 billion worldwide. Despite this, Top Gun 3 wasn't rushed into production, and it has taken until 2024 to hear any real news.

Top Gun 2: All 6 Jet Fighter Planes That Appear In Maverick

Top Gun: Maverick put Tom Cruise back in the cockpit after three decades, but which specific jet fighter planes appear in the followup to Top Gun?

Glen Powell Teases Top Gun 3

With the confirmed threequel languishing in uncertain territory, the latest update sees Glen Powell offer a tease for Top Gun 3 . While appearing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Hangman actor spoke cryptically about the upcoming movie, going as far to say " I have a date ." It's unclear what that comment means, but it suggests that he has a production start date on his schedule. Intriguingly, Powell also politely shut down any further discussion when asked if he had any details to reveal about Top Gun 3 , saying " Absolutely not ."

Tom Cruise is currently working on Mission: Impossible 8 and it isn't clear if there are any other projects on his schedule before he can return for Top Gun 3 .

The Classic '80s Franchise Returns Again

While speculation about the sequel has been high since the film was such a box-office juggernaut, Top Gun 3 wasn't officially confirmed until January 2024. However, the confirmation was also accompanied by news of Tom Cruise's return as Pete Mitchell , further proof that the sequel would be on the way soon.

Stream Top Gun: Maverick on Amazon Prime Video, MGM+, and Paramount+.

Tom Cruise Will Return For The Third Movie

While most of the cast of Top Gun 3 is still under wraps, early news suggests that the ensemble of Maverick may return en masse . When the sequel was announced in January 2024, it was revealed that Tom Cruise would reprise his role as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, quelling rumors that he wouldn't be involved with the third film. Additionally, it was revealed that Cruise would be joined by his Maverick co-stars Miles Teller as Lt. Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw and Glen Powell as Lt. Jake 'Hangman' Seresin.

The rest of the returning cast might include:

Does Top Gun: Maverick Set Up A Sequel?

Top Gun: Maverick's ending didn't explicitly set up a third movie, but it also didn't need to for a sequel to work. The Top Gun 3 story will inevitably feature a new mission that requires Maverick and the other pilots, and the specific details will be secondary to what it means for the development of their characters. However, Maverick did plant a seed for a potential new story because Admiral Cain planned to replace human pilots with a drone armada. Perhaps Top Gun 3 would pit Maverick and other human pilots against Cain's drones to prove that man is superior to a machine.

What would make this story even better is a Top Gun reunion. As previously mentioned, most of the crew didn't come back for Top Gun 2 , so a battle against the machines sets up the perfect reunion story for Top Gun 3 . Top Gun 3 could see the original fighter pilot team reuniting to prove that men fly better than machines, and it would be a satisfying tribute to the original movie. Needless to say, the storyline that sees replacing human pilots with drones will probably be a part of Top Gun 3 's setup, but it'll be interesting to see in what capacity.

Top Gun 3: Further News & Info

• Top Gun 3's Surprise Announcement Got Excited Reactions From Maverick Pilots
• Top Gun 3 Reportedly In Development, Tom Cruise & 2 Maverick Stars To Return
• Top Gun 3's Potential Cyclone Return Gets Confident Response From Jon Hamm (With 1 Caveat)
• How Glen Powell Is Approaching Top Gun 3 Differently After Real-Life Blue Angels Experience
• Top Gun 3 Release Timeline Addressed By Franchise Producer
• Upcoming Releases