Tom Cruise Cannot Be Stifled and His Directors Can Only Present His Spectacle with Awe

Top Gun wasn’t the first hit Tom Cruise movie, but 36 years later, it remains his ur-hit: The one that vaulted him to megastardom, popularized his star persona, inspired several direct self-ripoffs (Cocktail; Days of Thunder) and, adjusting for inflation, remains his highest-grossing film. It does seem remotely possible that the new legacy sequel Top Gun: Maverick could displace it in that last category—and even more likely that if Maverick doesn’t, nothing else will, either. The enduring popularity and influence of Top Gun is especially impressive because much of Cruise’s career since 1986 has been an exercise in superhuman resilience. During the 20 years that elapsed between Top Gun and 2006’s Mission: Impossible III, Cruise seemed nearly untouchable. Sure, he had the occasional box office or critical fumble, but he toplined over a dozen movies that made $100M or more, and worked with an enviable who’s-who of filmmakers: Beloved auteurs like Spielberg, Scorsese and De Palma; maestros of action and machismo like Tony Scott, John Woo and Michael Mann; distinctive voices like Oliver Stone and Cameron Crowe; Paul Thomas Anderson and Stanley Kubrick in the same year.
Yet during this two-decade period, Cruise also never worked with the same director more than twice. (He re-teamed with Spielberg, Crowe and Scott.) For personal reasons—I wrote a periodic column about actor-director collaborations—I consider three the magic number indicating an ongoing actor-director relationship, so it’s stuck out to me that Cruise doesn’t have as many of these as Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Tom Hanks or Matt Damon. So far, Cruise has crossed that threshold only once, and recently, by repeatedly rehiring his current Mission: Impossible co-pilot Christopher McQuarrie.
McQuarrie has become Cruise’s most constant collaborator; in addition to directing him in Jack Reacher and two Mission: Impossible pictures (with two more on the way), he has screenwriting and/or producing credits on Valkyrie, Edge of Tomorrow, The Mummy and this newest Top Gun. He’s a talented filmmaker whose prominence in Cruise’s later-period career also speaks to the mega-actor’s increasingly cloistered inner circle (and possibly the limited number of filmmakers willing to stare into Cruise’s presumably blinding intensity). Indeed, while Cruise has yet to make three non-sequels with the same director, he’s been returning to familiar filmmakers more often than ever in his past decade: Five and counting with McQuarrie, two with Doug Liman, one more with Edward Zwick (who previously directed him in The Last Samurai) and two with Top Gun sequel director Joseph Kosinski.
By most measures, Kosinski does an admirable job bringing back Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, considering that his past Cruise experience was with the decidedly second-tier sci-fi picture Oblivion. It’s not as if the late, great Tony Scott can claim more reputable Cruise control, either; their other movie together was Days of Thunder, a racing drama that’s basically Top Gun with a little more honesty about its own nastiness. Maverick, on the other hand, combines the stoic dad-movie humanity of Kosinski’s Only the Brave with the clean-lined compositions of his other decades-later follow-up to an ’80s movie, Tron: Legacy. It’s a bit like a sleekly-designed couch that turns out to be surprisingly comfy, too: Amidst some truly eye-popping aerial sequences that defy gravity while exuding far more of it than the average CG-choked spectacle, there are notes of humanity. Maverick faces his regrets, the inevitability of aging and, yes, his legacy.
This makes Top Gun: Maverick a far more appealing proposition than its predecessor—one of the worst things Cruise or Tony Scott ever made—and it’s touching to see this late-breaking franchise age with its audience, away from cocky jingoism. It’s similar to the recent trajectory of the Rocky/Creed series, making real drama out of Rocky IV’s bullshit—though that franchise’s humbler beginnings make it a more natural fit for this shift (and director Ryan Coogler made Creed a more muscular, beautifully crafted dude weepie than the new Top Gun can manage).