Thursday 12 May 2022 10:50 PM Tom Cruise's return as in new Top Gun sequel Maverick trends now

Maverick ( PG, 135 mins)

Rating:

Verdict:  Supersonic!

We all know that Tom Cruise does his own stunts, but this is something else. There he is in an F-18 fighter jet, his billion-dollar face contorted by G-forces, as the whole thing roars off an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean.

The only small nod to sanity is that Cruise isn’t flying the jet himself: The US Navy wouldn’t let him.

Otherwise, everything else is real: The plane, the warship, the stomach-turning gravitational pulls. He’s actually up there in the sky going at 1,189mph as the camera rolls.

In Top Gun: Maverick, the new sequel to the 1986 original, this kind of macho film-making isn’t just showing off. It’s the point.

Nowadays, they could get computers to do all the work, but Cruise refuses to stand aside. So they just strap him in and watch him go.

In this respect, Cruise has much in common with his character, fighter pilot Pete Mitchell, who doesn’t appear to have changed much over the past 30-odd years. He’s still going by the call sign ‘Maverick’ – and acting the tough guy, too. 

After graduating from the Top Gun school all those years ago, he’s stuck to riding his motorcycle, playing shirtless beach sports and flying planes really, really fast. ‘You should be a two-star admiral by now,’ says Ed Harris, playing a military big brass in an early scene. But Maverick remains a five-star rule breaker.