Early on in Tony Scott’s 1986 classic Top Gun, Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazanskycorners his brash, overconfident rival.
‘Maverick,’ Iceman (played by the late, great Val Kilmer) tells his fellow airman during a charged exchange. ‘It’s not your flying, it’s your attitude.’
When it comes to Tom Cruise, it’s a sentiment I can sympathise with.
I was born the same year as Top Gun first released in cinemas, into a world in which the Cruiser was already a massive star.
From then on, he always unsettled me, between the infamous sofa-jumping incident of 2005, and the baggage which accompanies his vocal Scientology beliefs.
While there’s no denying Cruise’s charisma, there was something about the way that he carried himself – that swagger and the scary intensity behind his eyes – which only compounded my belief that neither the man nor his films were for me.
This, combined with, an abject disinterest in most military films, made it easy to avoid Top Gun… until now.
With the Top Gun’s 40th anniversary upon us and my own middle age dawning, I decided that the time was finally right to set aside my preconceptions and give it a fair shot.
At the very least, as a professional critic and lifelong lover of film, I owed it to myself to fill in this gaping hole in my cinematic education.
It’s not as though I’m incapable of enjoying a Tom Cruise film either: I loved Interview With a Vampire as a wannabe Goth teenager, and his 2014 hit Edge of Tomorrow is a borderline masterpiece.
But those few movies I’ve enjoyed were always in spite of, and not due to the man once known as Thomas Cruise Mapother IV.
To paraphrase Iceman, it’s not the films. It’s the attitude.
How would I cope with one which puts all that bluster – all that oozing overconfidence and smarm – front and centre?
Yes, Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell suffers an abundance of overconfidence, clashing with his peers, superiors and love interest Charlie (Kelly McGillis) along the way.
Not an ounce of Maverick’s bravado is misplaced though – he really is that good.
So too, is Top Gun, a true classic of 80s maximalism. And much of that success is owed to Cruise’s performance, a once-in-a-career convergence of character, actor and the material he’s been dealt.
Yes, Maverick is smarmy, self-assured and just a little too in love with the job, but that’s a driving feature of the character, and not a bug.
And the same passion is true of Tom Cruise and everything he’s achieved since – dangling off of an airplane for the Mission: Impossible franchise, flying a fighter jet for real in Top Gun’s 2022 sequel and, uh, chewing out a crew member for breaking Covid-19 restrictions.
Love him or hate him, there’s no denying that he throws his entire self into everything he does, and in that respect, Maverick is perhaps his defining role (a close second: Ethan Hunt, whose utter ‘never-give-up’ tirelessness echoes this side of the actor’s personality).
I had always assumed that Top Gun was a big, brainless blockbuster about fighter jets and manly men throwing their weight around.
What I actually found was a surprisingly subversive take on the military machine, featuring a resonant portrayal of complex, messy male relationships at its core.
All these years, I’d been missing out on what might be Kilmer’s greatest performance. And for what… stubborness?
Maverick would be proud.
Regardless of whether its legendarily homoerotic subtext was intended, the arc of Iceman from Maverick’s biggest hater to his loyal wingman is one of the finest I’ve seen in all of cinema.
Where a lesser film would have turned Iceman into the villain, or left him the cold stuck-in-the-mud, Scott and the film’s screenwriters showcase an eye for character development which would become lost in all the talk of topless volleyball and sweaty abs.
Interviewed by Elle Magazine in 2006, the late Batman Forever star was asked to rank Top Gun’s ‘homoerotic content’ out of 10 (10 being as camp as Liberace in a F-11).
’11,’ the actor replied, without hesitation. For context, this is a man who originated nipples on the Batsuit – if anyone knows camp, it’s Val Kilmer.
It’s a film US critic Pauline Kael described as ‘a shiny homoerotic commercial,’ adding that ‘the pilots strut around the locker room, towels hanging precariously from their waists.’
As someone who adores the 1985 sequel A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge for its legendarily gay subtext, I should have loved Top Gun for bringing the same cheeky (if not entirely intentional) sense of subversion to the action film.
Far from being all fighter jets and explosions, it’s actually a story about male vulnerability (in Maverick’s struggle to overcome his fear of failure and trauma over his father’s death) and, ultimately, growth.
Is Top Gun Tom Cruise’s greatest movie?
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Yes, without a doubt
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No, he’s done better
In approaching Top Gun for the first time since its release, I taken aback by the terrific cinematography from Jeffrey L. Kimball, whose practical, in-flight aerial photography revolutionised the genre.
Setting aside Cruise and Kilmer for a moment, Top Gun also boasts a impressive supporting cast which includes Tim Robbins, Tom Skerritt, Michael Ironside, and Meg Ryan in one of her earliest roles.
And then there’s the soundtrack, which features such certifiable bangers as Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone and Berlin’s Take My Breath Away.
That said, it’s very much a product of its time, and this is perhaps evident in its surprisingly low Rotten Tomatoes score of 55% – with modern critics taking aim at its mythologising of the American military and macho posturing.
‘Top Gun offers too little for non-adolescent viewers to chew on,’ reads the Critics’ Consensus on the review aggregator, while praising its high-octane action and top-notch performances.
All that’s as maybe, but it took almost 40 years (the first 15 probably shouldn’t count) to let go of my immature grudge and give it a (hot) shot.
Cruise and Kilmer would reprise their roles for Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, a film credited with ‘bringing cinema back’ after COVID.
I wouldn’t know… I didn’t see that one either (although I did have the misfortune of falling asleep during Dead Reckoning: Part One, a year later).
However, on the basis of this one, I’d be more inclined to tune in and find out what Maverick’s been up recently… and maybe I won’t take another four decades to do it, either.
‘You’re still dangerous, but you can be my wingman anytime,’ Iceman tells Maverick as the film ends.
It’s a sentiment that I now, finally, understand.
I grounded my grudge to give Top Gun a chance. Suffice to say that it took my breath away.
Top Gun is playing in selected UK cinemas and streaming on Paramount Plus now.
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