Top Gun: Maverick

Directed by Joseph Kosinski, Top Gun: Maverick follows Tom Cruise’s Pete Mitchell as he’s tasked with training a dozen hotshot pilots, including Miles Teller’s Bradley Bradshaw and Glen Powell’s Jake Seresin, for a challenging, potentially impossible mission. Filmmaker Kosinski, working from a script by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Christopher McQuarrie, delivers a perpetually hit-and-miss endeavor that never quite becomes the enthralling thriller one might’ve anticipated, as the movie, which runs a palpably overlong 130 minutes, suffers from a sluggish midsection that spins its wheels to an often breathtaking extent – with the languid pacing exacerbated by an ongoing emphasis on padded-out (and sporadically needless) scenes and interludes. It’s clear, then, that Top Gun: Maverick benefits substantially from Cruise’s predictably magnetic, commanding performance and an ongoing assortment of legitimately compelling sequences, including a terrific mid-movie encounter between Pete and his former foe, Val Kilmer’s Tom Kazansky, while the admittedly stirring third act, which details Pete’s real-world efforts at completing the aforementioned mission, does ensure that the whole thing concludes on an entertaining note. The end result is a decent-enough sequel that ultimately falls right in line with its watchable yet far-from-flawless predecessor, with the movie’s mild success, in the final analysis, coming down to Cruise’s almost forcefully charismatic turn.

**1/2 out of ****