C’ sequel e sequel. Around Top Gun – Maverickwhich takes up the macho-sentimental blockbuster of 36 years ago, the index of tenderness goes to a thousand. When Tony Scott’s drama was released in 1986, it set a trend and grossed a lot, consolidating Tom Cruise’s fame as a child star. accompanied by two stars like Kelly McGillis and Meg Ryan. He was the typical colossal optimist of the 1980s, patriotic and aligned, fuffological and well inked. A love story of the skies with the daredevil toyboy who falls in love with the instructor and he believes himself responsible for the death of the co-pilot. The guide song Take My Breath Away won an Oscar and Giorgio Moroder’s score became a generational anthem.
Since then Cruise, now 59, has never stopped Maverick’s fluoride smile and, as a master stroke, he never gave in to the sirens to go back to it, thus reinforcing the idea of an unreproducible film, which has disappeared from the radar but to be kept in the memory. In all these years only the revolution of technological smoking has changed, the digital expansion. Veteran driver Pete Maverick Mitchell wears the same lived-in jacket and is still the fastest of allcapable of taking off and landing in a handkerchief, preferably on the deck of an aircraft carrier.
An ace to fly at low altitude, slip through narrow gorges and thus hide from the enemy anti-aircraft. Pete didn’t make a career out of not having to give up stunts. But he loves motorcycles and troubles as always, lacking as a sense of danger. Rebellious and unsurpassed when the tough start dancing. For overwhelmed with guilt. Maverick condemned himself to a blue solitude as a mechanic-test driver between the prehistoric F-14s and the more agile F-18s, with the protection of old comrade Tom Iceman Kazinsky (Val Kilmer) who in the meantime has become a tall poppy in the Navy (Note: Kilmer and his character are voiceless, a consequence of the radiation he actually underwent during chemotherapy for throat cancer.)
The new Top Guns press, Champion keeps back pain at bay and chews bitter when Rear Admiral Ed Harris assigns him to a school camp. She will have to teach his talent to the kid aviators for the baptism of fire. To trigger the Maverick revival are 1) the clashes with Bradley Rooster Bradshaw (Miles Teller, the boy of Whiplash), that is the son of Goose, the man who could not save and cause of eternal remorse, and 2) The renewed idyll with ex Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connelly), who works as a bartender and has a daughter in the middle of a teenage crisis. Please don’t make Mom suffer again, intimates the little girl. The right occasion to shake up, eliminate the ghosts of the past and move on to new promises. Maverick a disenchanted, bruised man who has lost faith in others but not the courage to face life hard-nosed.
Iceman advises his newfound friend: the time has come to let go of the past. The answer: Sorry, I don’t know how to do it. Maverick teaches Rooster not to think too much during fights and to let his instincts work. Just like a good dad would. Director Joseph Kosinski wisely doses emotional management to avoid accusations of fuss. The irony cools the pathos. The technical side is commendable and alone holds up the not small length of the film (131 ‘). The story does not end there, of course: but there is to believe what if Top Gun – Maverick it will have a sequel, it will not be Tom Cruise playing it. In the hangars, in addition to Teller, the alter ego of Maverick, Hangman (Glen Powell) circulates and, unfortunately, the world abounds in war or para-war contexts from which to draw to feed the most successful saga of avio-sentimental cinema.
TOP GUN – MAVERICK by Joseph Kosinski
(Usa, 2022, duration 131 ‘)
con Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman
Rating: *** out of 5
In the halls
28 maggio 2022 | 08:07
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