The first reviews for Top Gun: Maverick praise the sequel as a superior film to the original, hailing Tom Cruise’s performance as Oscar-worthy.
The reviews for “Top Gun: Maverick” are in, and it sure sounds like the sequel to Tom Cruise’s iconic, macho-driven 1986 film is destined to be one of the most acclaimed blockbusters of the year. The follow-up finds Cruise reprising his role as Maverick to lead a new group of young pilots, which includes Goose’s son, “Rooster,” played by Miles Teller. Cruise’s “Oblivion” director Joseph Kosinski is behind the camera and his “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie is onboard as a co-writer and producer, and together it appears this team has actually made a sequel that’s better than the original. In his review at IndieWire, David Ehrlich hailed the film as a kind of thesis statement for Cruise’s movie stardom: “If ‘Top Gun’ was a fun film because it invented Tom Cruise, ‘Maverick’ is a great film because it immortalizes him. It’s not a Tom Cruise movie so much as it’s ‘Tom Cruise: The Movie,’ and by the time it’s over, even his fiercest critics might have to admit that they’ll miss him when he’s gone.”
In his LA Times review, Justin Chang hailed “Maverick” as a superior film to the original: “’Top Gun: Maverick’ is a longer, costlier and appreciably weightier affair, and its expanded emotional scope and heightened production values (including a score by the original film’s composer, Harold Faltermeyer) give it a classy, elegiac sheen; it’s like a hot summer diversion in prestige-dinosaur drag, or vice versa.
