In Review: 'Top Gun: Maverick,' 'The Bob's Burgers Movie'

Tom Cruise takes to the skies as he reprises one of his most famous roles and the Belcher family hits the big screen.

Top Gun: Maverick
Dir. Joseph Kosinski
131 min.

1986 was the year Tom Cruise truly became Tom Cruise, one that found him starring in both Top Gun—a huge hit that uses the Navy’s elite Fighter Weapons School program as the backdrop for a story of personal achievement, stunning sunsets, and awkward sex scenes—but also Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money. The latter, a decades-later sequel to 1960’s The Hustler, found Cruise playing opposite Paul Newman’s “Fast Eddie” Felson, an aging pool shark who serves as first mentor then rival to Cruise’s up-and-coming Vincent Lauria. There is, unavoidably, a meta element to the film. Newman, who had just turned 61 when The Color of Money premiered, won an Oscar for his portrayal of a man who resists being put out to pasture, even as he's watched time blunt his edge just as it's swept away much of the world he once knew. The actor had entered the final act of a remarkable career, and the role reflected that. Cruise, meanwhile, was 24 and had it all ahead of him. 

That was 36 years ago. As Top Gun: Maverick hits theaters, Cruise is 59, just two years younger than Newman when they played opposite one another in 1986, so it’s fitting that he would now let himself be slotted in the aging mentor role in a belated sequel of his own. The parallels are striking. Top Gun: Maverick is a film interested in the passage of time and the passing of torches, and Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, like Fast Eddie, has become a relic of the way things used to be done, still keeping the flame alive even as the winds blow harder. He even has a Vincent of his own, of sorts, in the form of Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s late wingman Goose, whose death in the original Top Gun first makes Maverick sad but then inspires him to be the best he can be.

The differences, however, are just as striking. Top Gun ended with Maverick becoming the apotheosis of American awesomeness, while Top Gun: Maverick plays like a series of scenes designed to reconfirm that awesomeness, the years be damned, starting with an opening that finds him breaking the rules to test an experimental plane against the orders of an admiral (Ed Harris) eager to phase out armed combat in favor of drones. The movie has moments of reflection, most touchingly a mid-film scene that reunites Maverick with Tom “Iceman” Kazansky, the Top Gun rival played by Val Kilmer. The character, like Kilmer, has been rendered largely speechless by illness, a striking reminder that these ’80s icons of eternal youth are no longer youthful and certainly not eternal.

The new Top Gun is otherwise just as shallow as the first, whose tone, look and story beats it echoes. Maverick rekindles an obligatory romance with Penny (Jennifer Connelly), a single mom bar owner (and the admiral’s daughter mentioned but never seen in the original). Teller brings considerable intensity to Rooster but struggles with a script that defines the character entirely in terms of his father. He’s styled to look like Anthony Edwards in the 1986 film, mustache and all, and shares both Goose’s fondness for Hawaiian shirts and pounding out Jerry Lee Lewis covers while chugging beers. (That’s some strong DNA!) The rest of the younger class are photogenic, charismatic, and mostly neglected.

But those aerial sequences! Kosinski drops his camera in the cockpit as the cast experiences the unmistakable discomfort of high-speed flight. The climax, a kind of real-world version of the Star Wars Death Star trench run in which everything has to go right to take out a treaty-violating uranium enrichment facility, is thrillingly staged. The film’s much-hyped decision to shoot the actors in the cockpits of jets in flights turns out to be more than just hype, lending the sequences an immediacy and intensity rare in our CGI-heavy moment. These setpieces are almost enough to paper over the film’s flaws, just as Cruise’s movie star magnetism is almost enough to make it seem like there’s more going on beneath the surface of the movie than there is. Almost. —Keith Phipps

The Bob’s Burgers Movie
Dirs. Louren Bouchard, Bernard Derriman
102 min.

The early Star Trek movies tended to attract the same complaint when they first hit theaters: This is really just a long episode of the show. While that wasn’t necessarily true — Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is very much a Star Trek story by way of an ’80s blockbuster — the complaint could be easily countered by those who enjoyed the TV show: So? Related: The Bob’s Burgers Movie is essentially a long episode of the long-running television series. That makes it, as fans of the long-running animated sitcom would already suspect, a delightful way to spend 102 minutes. And for those unfamiliar with the show, it’s as good of a jumping-on point as any of its 238 episodes.

Using slightly more polished animation without breaking from the look of the show, The Bob’s Burgers Movie offers a slightly more ambitious story to match. Summer looms, as does a mounting crisis. The uneven sidewalk outside the Belcher family’s restaurant gives way to a sinkhole just as the bank comes calling to collect an overdue loan, unpersuaded by the breakfast burger that parents/restauranteurs Bob (H. Jon Benjamin) and Linda (John Roberts) bring to a meeting at the bank. That crisis in turn yields a mystery in the form of the body of a murdered carny discovered at the bottom of the hole. The sinkhole isn’t the only crisis, either: teenaged Tina (Dan Mintz) wonders if she really wants a summer romance with her crush, Louise (Kristen Schaal) has internalized the taunts of some classmates questioning her courage, and Gene (Eugene Mirman) has become unsure about the direction of his band. (Some crises are bigger than others.)

It’s not particularly surprising that there’s little here that couldn’t have worked as a series of episodes. But one of the keys to Bob’s Burgers’ success has been its commitment to keeping a tight focus on the Belcher family and (mostly) limiting the action to a few city blocks of the unnamed seaside town they call home. The Movie stays the course while dropping in a couple of musical numbers that would break a network TV budget, giving each of the central characters a meaningful subplot, and visiting previously unseen corners of the show’s universe, like a neighborhood entirely by carnies. It’s, as longtime viewers would expect, at once weird, warm, and consistently funny.  Yes, it’s essentially a long episode of the show. No, that’s never a problem. —Keith Phipps