The Last Action Hero

In an early scene in Top Gun: Maverick, an annoyed admiral (Ed Harris) reprimands Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) with a curt, “Your kind is headed for extinction.” Maverick replies, “Maybe so, sir. But not today.”

While not explicitly breaking the fourth wall, it does feel like this retort is not simply aimed at the character on the screen, but also to those of us in the audience that are wondering what the future holds for a quintessential movie star.

Top Gun: Maverick feels like the culmination of what Cruise has been trying to “say” since at least the late 2000s. While we’re in an age of legacy sequels in which older actors “hand off” their franchises to younger talent, Cruise still insists on being the star of the show. While other A-listers move into prestige TV, major streaming deals, or using their names to elevate small projects made for up-and-coming talent, Cruise wants to be an A-list movie star in theatrically released pictures in an age where studios don’t want A-list movie stars in theatrically released pictures. This is at odds with the current trend of studios centering franchises, not actors, as their theatrical stars. Studios may still want famous actors, but we’ve largely passed the era of the face on the poster driving ticket sales. Cruise is aware that he and his ilk are headed for extinction. But all of his film choices of the past decade have staunchly said, “Maybe so. But not today.”

Tom Cruise is noted for being an intensely private actor, and yet we know quite a bit about him—ever since Risky Business catapulted him to stardom at age 21, and Top Gun cemented him in the A-list stratosphere at age 23. His romantic relationships have sold countless tabloids, and his adherence to Scientology and close friendship with its current leader only raises further questions. But he’s also a guy who will refuse to answer a question as simple “What is your favorite movie?” Looking at Cruise, you see the push and pull of an actor who has been in the public spotlight for almost 40 years and has become publicly cautious to a shocking, if not surprising, degree.

My theory on this is that Cruise has realized that every time he opened up, it blew up in his face, none more so than his disastrous 2005 press tour for War of the Worlds where he proclaimed his love for Katie Holmes on Oprah and called Matt Lauer “glib” on The Today Show for suggesting that anti-depressants can help people (Scientology is famously against psychiatry). The public damage to Cruise’s image was so immense that Mission: Impossible III made over $100 million less than Mission: Impossible II, and the drama Lions for Lambs was a dud (to be fair, Lions for Lambs is quite bad and its failures don’t rest entirely on Cruise). To reignite his career, Cruise threw on a fat suit and danced to Ludacris for Tropic Thunder, which did the trick.

Having flirted with the end of his time as an A-lister, Cruise decided that he had to throw everything he could into being the biggest action star possible. When Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol rolled around, there was talk of the film being a hand-off of sorts where Cruise’s Ethan Hunt would give way to franchise newcomer William Brandt (Jeremy Renner). Cruise responded by hanging off the tallest building in the world. Except for his comic supporting role in Rock of Ages, every film Cruise has done since 2008’s Knight and Day is an action movie. The shades of the genre may change (Oblivion is sci-fi action, American Made is action-drama), but Cruise, who will turn 60 this July, has steadfastly commited himself not only to action, but to being the man who will do the action himself.

This decision feels calculated in a way that only someone who has been an A-list movie star for his entire adult life could figure. Up until 2008, Cruise was a “normal” actor in how he chose his projects. He would do the big blockbuster stuff, but he still wanted to work with auteur directors and maybe one day get an Academy Award. But then the switch flipped, and Cruise decided he would only pursue the action genre, and he would do so with himself at the center of his movies. He would not be a vehicle for an IP character but ensure that in an age of CGI and IP-based franchises that he, Tom Cruise, would continue to be the draw. His solution was to work as hard as humanly possible at making entertaining movies, and let people know how hard he was working.

The Man in the Cockpit

Top Gun: Maverick follows Cruise’s character back to the Top Gun flight academy to train a group of next-gen hot-shot fighter pilots to run a dangerous bombing mission. Among the pilots is “Rooster” (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s deceased best friend and co-pilot “Goose” (Anthony Edwards) from the first movie.

In a world of legacy sequels, it’s not hard to see how this film could have gone a different way, with Rooster as the main character, controlling the POV, and having Maverick impart wisdom that allows him to become his best self. This plot structure has been known to work well in other projects—namely, in 2015’s Creed, where Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) trains the son (Michael B. Jordan) of his deceased friend Apollo (Carl Weathers). But Tom Cruise is not Sylvester Stallone, and Cruise doesn’t do supporting roles anymore (and he never did them that much to begin with). A Top Gun movie could only be led by Tom Cruise.

When flight school gets underway, the plot is about showing all the young hot shots that Maverick is still better than all of them. He may still be a captain (or an actor in his late-50s doing the stunts himself to keep his star-power relative), but he’s still The Best. What other people think is impossible is what Maverick can accomplish with time to spare, and while he has grinning admiration for the next generation, he’s not willing to hand over the controls yet. “Not today.”

From Villain to Hero of the Multiplex

Arguably the most impressive aspect of Top Gun: Maverick is how it proves Tom Cruise right. Despite Cruise’s youthful countenance, he’s still a 59-year-old man reprising a role he played when he was 23 and arguing that he’s even better now. You have to keep in mind that while the original Top Gun was a box office smash and remains popular today, it did not go over well with critics who saw it as the crystallization of the blockbuster filmmaking that had killed Hollywood’s Second Golden Age of the late-60s/early-70s. If Jaws and Star Wars had ushered in the blockbuster era, then Top Gun was its apotheosis—a film comprised of nothing but trailer moments and total adrenaline (this is the argument of film historian Mark Harris in a 2011 editorial). Its thin story (hot shot pilot experiences slight doubt before becoming even more awesome) existed only to get the audience high on jingoistic military action. Never mind that the action is impressive and weighted down by characters we care about with clear stakes wrapped in an appealing package.1 Blockbusters were, by their nature, disposable summer fare to entertain kids who were out of school and looking for something to do.

Setting aside how Top Gun has stood the test of time as a fun action movie, its sequel now stands in starkly different company than the original. Critics wrung their hands about how this kind of MTV-generation filmmaking would affect the cinematic landscape—and to be fair, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and his late partner Don Simpson had a lot of success with these kinds of mass-appeal blockbusters. For his part, Cruise seemed particularly wary of not letting the blockbuster define him. Although he would have a couple of “fun” movies to follow up Top Gun like Cocktail (1988) and Days of Thunder (1990) (neither of these movies are particularly good), he primarily focused on dramas including Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money, the Best Picture-winning Rain Man, Born of the Fourth of July (the film that probably should have won Cruise his Oscar), and the top-notch legal drama A Few Good Men. Cruise’s choices show an actor who knew he had box office clout using it to make sure audiences knew he was also a serious actor.

But in 2022, the original Top Gun is a movie no one would ever make because it’s not based on anything and its franchise and international appeal are limited (how many movies can you make about fighter pilots, and what’s the global interest in movies about the U.S. Air Force kicking ass?). But Tom Cruise is still a star, and his ethos is on full display with Top Gun: Maverick: I am the best there is because I work harder than anyone at entertaining the audience and giving them a theatrical experience unlike any other in a CGI-drenched landscape.

In this way, the Top Gun movies serve as bookends to a particular era of blockbuster filmmaking. Cruise may still make the kind of movies where practical effects and stunt work reign supreme, but he’s the last of his kind. Top Gun: Maverick makes the argument that something valuable has been lost here, and it’s not simply nostalgia to argue otherwise. We live in the age of what critic Drew McWeeny called “The Age of Casual Magic.” Essentially, since anything is possible with CGI, it now fails to wow us. We never ask, “How did they do that?” because the answer is always, “With a computer.” That’s not to diminish the hard work of VFX artists who are constantly solving problems we would never even consider when it comes to movies and the billions of dollars made off their labor. That’s also not to diminish the use of CGI for safety reasons or to create the impossible creatures and worlds required by the supernatural stories that get told on a blockbuster canvas.

And yet when you watch Top Gun: Maverick on the big screen, you are transported. It is the most thrilling experience I’ve had in a theater since Mad Max: Fury Road, another film that relies heavily on practical effects and stunt work. Because Cruise has remade his brand into “I’m going to actually do the thing,” you don’t watch fighter jets doing amazing maneuvers and think, “Ah, nice CGI.” You’re looking at people essentially risking their lives for our entertainment. I can look at shots in this movie and wonder how they pulled them off with the best answer I can conjure being, “A camera mounted to a jet?” But eventually I stopped trying to “solve” the movie and let it take me for a ride.

Perhaps Top Gun: Maverick is simply a variation on the blockbuster formula Martin Scorsese critiqued when he compared Marvel movies to theme park rides. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness may be the CGI-filled, franchise-heavy modern flavor with Top Gun: Maverick as the throwback, but I think that’s selling the latter short. Maverick knows how to be winning not only with its action scenes, but with the story it’s telling. The script has a heavy dose of Mission: Impossible with how the bombing run is set up, director Joseph Kosinski does an outstanding job making the film feel like a cohesive whole, and at the center you’ve got Cruise.

I’m impressed with how Maverick never feels revanchist or bitter. It’s a movie that’s well aware that Cruise is on his way out (and my particular theory on why Cruise has done so many actioners lately is that he knows both the marketplace and his body are working against him for how long he can make these kinds of movies), but chooses to articulate why he believes his current mode—delivering the most impressive big screen spectacle with as little CG or franchise mythos as possible—is worth preserving. Sure, that’s ultimately self-serving for Cruise, the only actor of his caliber who’s even attempting this kind of spectacle.2 But it’s also the only world where things make sense for Cruise. He doesn’t begrudge the younger generation, but he’s not here to pass the torch. He’s here to go as hard as he possible can until that torch stops burning.