Y’all May Be High, but You Can’t Fly on Nostalgia

“Top Gun: Maverick” is a belated sequel that achieves the exceedingly likely by surpassing in quality its overvalued, cliché-ridden trash predecessor of a feature-length Navy recruitment and MTV video, "Top Gun" (1986). It’s still not good. Not even close. But, yup, it’s better. It’s still a commercial subsidized by the U.S. Department of Defense. The scoring remains obnoxious. There’s a dumb romance subplot. The fighter pilots joshing each other still sends eyes rolling to the back of the head.

Plus, now there’s the asinine nostalgia of it all. The same uncritical sentimentality for the Reagan era that gave us “Make America Great Again” again and other stupid sequels such as that “Bill & Ted” thing or “Roseanne” even without Roseanne on TV, and as brought to you by the same director who did it with “Tron” 2. Makes sense that the defensive posture of "don't think" from the original becomes a mantra here. Sure, I miss celluloid and practical effects, but if Tom Cruise is the last movie star and the metatext here is that filmmaking is the military industrial complex, then cinema is already dead.

So, Cruise takes his shirt off again to play a ball game in some precisely-edited vanity-project choreography to not embarrass the aging movie star among a field of shirtless relative youngsters. The homoerotism of it’s gone, too, now that there’s an aviatrix in the mix. It’s even longer. And, without even the Cold War enemy of the Soviets, the dehumanizing of the enemy of American imperialism goes so far as the target being a bunch of faceless nobodies from an unnamed country. Nominally, they’re blowing up a uranium-enrichment plant, but it might as well be an underground children’s hospital for all it matters as an excuse for blind American militaristic chest thumping.

On the other hand, at least there’s a target this time to build the drama up for beyond a stupid school trophy. Some drama is finally pulled from the corpse of the dead buddy, too. Although whatever “documentary” look Tony Scott was going for in the original goes out the window with this cartoonish ("Star Wars" (1977) really) mission, at least the aerial action now makes sense visually because most of the movie is spent explaining the operation over and over again. Also, there are some yucks to be had and in an intentional—MCU let’s take a break from the life-threatening tension to crack a joke—sort of way and not, as with its predecessor, only at the expense of the cornball proceedings. An extremely low bar that wouldn’t be surprising to have overcome even had professional entertainment critics not blown expectations beyond all good sense (96% on RottenTomatoes, for crying out loud) with their mushy blather over this junk, some decent aerial action aside, but they did surpass it.

Also, albeit due to China in general backing out of Hollywood productions of late (including this one, at one time a Chinese co-production) and Sino-US relations souring, at least they restored, after their exclusion in that trailer, the Taiwanese and Japanese flags to Maverick’s jacket. That alone makes this preferable to “Uncharted” (2022). Fitting, too, if your aim is to project American power.