“Top Gun: Maverick” and My Tom Cruise Problem
What a load of sap that was! I’ll cut to the chase; Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise and that’s fine. He is in many ways something of a lingering echo of a bygone Hollywood. I’ll return to more thoughts about Tom later. Let’s take a quick look at another movie in the running for Best Picture. Is it bad that, out of the gate, I started laughing? The first notes of “Danger Zone” and I was dying to see a cameo by Sterling Archer. Having said that, though, a lot of the grinning I did do was based on a kind of fondness for watching a film that accomplished what it set out to do. In this regard, “Top Gun: Maverick” is not so very different from “Cocaine Bear.” It is, by turns, rousing, and by other turns, actually kind of touching. Let me be clear: I did not like “Top Gun”; I wouldn’t go so far as to say I hated it, but I didn’t like it. Tony Scott’s opus was peak Reagan Era militaristic, jingo-ridden bullshit with the barest sketches of characters populating a vapid, arid pl...