Even on the small screen, this twilight sequel is worth watching. In particular for its masterful opening, which sees Maverick-Cruise at the controls of an already scrappy prototype (human pilots are more fallible than drones when it comes to breaking speed records, his superiors argue). Praise of transgression and panache (flight is forbidden and the plane, expensive and magnificent), celestial images of the device splitting the stratosphere as if it were spinning towards a very close beyond: this elegiac blockbuster is crossed by wonderful melancholy.
And suddenly Cruise lets go
It is expressed as much by its many sequences of official introspection, moreover effective as the devil (the reunion of the hero with his great rival Iceman, camped by a Val Kilmer reduced by the disease, simple and beautiful moment), as by this myriad nanoseconds during which Tom Cruise lets go, unconsciously or not: on a pillow, exhausted like an nursing home resident, after a gentle embrace with a past love (the moving Jennifer Connelly, the child star of “Once Upon a times in America” now in her fifties); in front of a squad of recruits to trim, finally caught up by adulthood – here is Maverick in the skin of an honorable teacher, forced to pass on the flame, finally assume his age and his responsibilities.
Paradoxically, and this completes the greatness of the film, Tom Cruise, even fallen, even too old to get laid, does not resign himself: regularly reminded of the laws of passing time and narrative verisimilitude, he rejects the limits of the plausible, the reasonable and the elements, prolongs his myth of eternal superman with teeth. He will never become an Eastwoodian star, a narcissus auscultating his wrinkles and his white hair. While “Top Gun” first name was basically a post-adolescent hormonal shoot that testified to the voracious ambitions of a newly hatched star, “Top Gun: Maverick” only postpones this cruisian dream of eternal youth in its ultimate entrenchments: the film is content to touch a deadly horizon without ever crossing it, finding there an increase in vitality, nerve and adrenaline.
Saturday January 21 at 9 p.m. on Canal+. American action film by Joseph Kosinski (2022). With Tom Cruise, Jennifer Connelly, Val Kilmer. 2:11.
