I love airplanes. I will happily watch any movie with airplanes in it, even computer-animated cartoons featuring airplanes. Not long ago, I had the pleasure of watching Disney’s charming Planes for the first time. It’s the story of Dusty Crophopper, a lumbering, loveable crop duster from Propwash Junction who aspires to compete in a big air race. My little grandkiddos had seen the film easily a dozen times but were happy to watch it yet again with me, in much the same way I’ve watched Top Gun over the years, over and over. Did I care the first time I saw Top Gun (or the last time, for that matter) about the movie’s abundant cheese factor? About the less-than-zero chemistry between Kelly McGillis and Tom Cruise? About the gaping plot holes? Nope. I’m an unabashed Cruise fan and Top Gun offered in my opinion among the best openings of any movie ever made, with its stylish and exciting montage of aircraft carrier flight deck operations. I was hooked from the opening frames and willingly went along for the ride. And thus it was, with an open mind, that I recently sat down and rewatched the sequel to Top Gun—Top Gun Maverick.
The first time I saw the sequel was last year in a movie theater. Flying scenes aside, which were great, I was alone among my family members in thinking that the film was pretty lame. Maybe it was because I spent a decade working as screenwriter in Hollywood, penning more than my share of marginal movie scripts, and grew too adept at seeing the flaws in the work of other writers as well as my own. Or maybe it was my admitted envy as a pilot that Cruise owns a beautifully restored P-51 Mustang fighter and got to do catapult shots off carriers in Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets while filming Top Gun Maverick Whatever the reasons, I found myself after about twenty minutes into the sequel looking impatiently at my watch and rolling my eyes at its abundant contrivances, the preposterousness of its all-too-predictable plot, and the flagrant theft of story devices from other blockbuster movies. My mind began to drift. Could the same criticisms apply to my own work? Were my Cordell Logan novels like Voodoo Ridge and Hot Start derivative of mysteries written by others? I sure hoped not. I purposely go out of my way not to read any fiction when I’m writing for fear of inadvertently borrowing plot twists and writing styles.
Anyway, much as I had hoped otherwise, I’m sad to report that my opinion of Top Gun Maverick changed little from having watched the flick the first time.
I won’t catalogue my many specific grievances except for the following. At the end of the first Top Gun, Tom Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell saves the day by splashing three enemy MiGs, thus becoming—as the sequel points out— the first American fighter pilot to have done so in the past 40 years. In the sequel, thirty-six years later, he’s hanging out at a dive watering hole in San Diego where an old girlfriend tends bar. In strolls a group of the Navy’s hottest fighter jocks who somehow don’t recognize Maverick and have no idea he’s been brought in to train them for a top-secret mission. Maverick’s wearing his official Navy flight jacket festooned with squadron patches and looking every inch like the cool guy, albeit aging Navy aviator. I’ve had the honor of hanging out in a few of those dives with a few of those cool guys. Believe me, if a Top Gun legend like Maverick was sitting at the bar nursing a brewski, word would spread quickly among other fighter jocks that they were in the presence of greatness, and the beers would be on them the rest of the night. In the movie, however, the cocky newbies treat Maverick like he’s an over-the-hill wanna-be before literally tossing him out of the bar on his ass. Call me picky, but by that point, I was having none of it.
So, sorry, Tom Cruise. I guess you could say I’ve lost that lovin’ feeling. As the old expressing goes, “Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.” Top Gun Maverick was not one of them. That said, Tom, buddy, if you ever happen to read this, and you’re looking for somebody to go for a hop with you in that gorgeous P-51 of yours, I’ll be there with my hair on fire.