** (out of ****)
Starring Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards, Tom Skerrit, Michael Ironside, Meg Ryan, James Tolkan, and Tim Robbins
Directed by Tony Scott & written by Jack Epps, Jr. and Jim Cash
1986
109 min PG
An awful, awful movie, yet at times a beautiful one as well. The bit with the co-pilot colliding with his canopy after being ejected is as beautiful as it is utterly impossible. It’s shot almost entirely in silhouette, with a sky streaked with high contrast orange sunlight in the background, a color much beloved by the film’s director. That man is that wizard of shallow, empty gloss, master hack (Hackmaster? Whatever) Tony Scott, kid brother of Ridley Scott, who is himself often straddling the line between hack and artist. Where “Top Gun” succeeds is in exciting aerial footage of take-offs, landings, and dogfights, as fighter jets speed across forbidding landscapes and endless oceans. Don’t let the Pauline Kaels of the world fool you: there’s no shame in appreciating the architectural grace and functional beauty of an F14, even if you find the use to which it is put loathsome.
Scott succeeds in making these complex maneuvers largely comprehensible. Sun light streams across canopies as squinty pilots frantically search the heavens for their adversaries, and toward the end there’s an especially breathtaking shot of an F14 literally swarmed by enemy fighters. “Top Gun’s” aerial ballets, when they don’t use real Navy jets, are largely practical effects, which, if done well, are almost always more convincing than computer effects. At least if you’re part of my generation. The good parts of “Top Gun” deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as “The Right Stuff,” although the rest of the movie is a solid 15 or 20 IQ points lower.
Leave it to Tony Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer to take something as inherently dramatic as flying a $30 million death machine and then shift most of their focus to a stupid love story and a snotty pilot with lame daddy issues who needs to “let go of the past” and “learn to believe in himself” and “write platitudes in quotation marks.” It’s the same stuff that’s been recycled for the billionth time into the “Harry Potter” films, although without nearly as much tact. “Top Gun” is from the pens of Jack Epps, Jr. and Jim Cash, whose IMDb credits (“Anaconda,” “The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas”) do not contain a single film that one suspects they had a deep, burning, soul-defining urge to write (although “Dick Tracy” is a fine Hollywood-style clothesline for its visual style). Our hero goes up into the air, then comes back down and everyone talks about what he did in the air, then they go back up into the air, et cetera. Some movies feel like journeys; “Top Gun” feels like it goes nowhere.
Perhaps what’s so irritating about Bruckheimer movies is that he’s obviously a smart guy but he thinks we’re very dumb. He doesn’t seem to think we can sit through an actual movie about fighter jets, which is all anyone remembers or likes about “Top Gun” anyway. That, and young Tom Cruise does display a whole lot of raw energy. About the only other actor worth mentioning is the great, perpetually angry character actor James Tolkan, of “Back to the Future” “slacker!” fame, doing what he does best.
And, of course, “Top Gun” is overflowing with all manner of homoeroticism, which has haunted poor Tom to this day, even culminating in his best film, “Eyes Wide Shut,” in which he is accused of being gay by absolute strangers and never given an opportunity to prove his manhood. “Top Gun” is wall-to-wall pretty boys, covered in sweat, standing half-naked in locker rooms, yelling at each other with their faces inches apart, and exchanging “threatening” looks that are much closer to “come hither stares.” The only major female role is real-life lesbian Kelly McGillis (“Witness”) and she woos Cruise by dressing like a man and answering to the name “Charlie.” From the officer yelling out “I want some butts!” to the way Tom Skerrit seems to talk in an enamored, sleepy way every time Tom is around, I don’t cite the unbelievable amount of gayness, unintentional or otherwise, as one of the film’s weaknesses. In fact, it—and all the flying—was about the only thing that made “Top Gun” watchable last night.
But when you’re eight-years-old none of this seems to matter. You can tune out everything besides the airplanes flying after each other and still have a grand old time. A friend of mine pointed that the real-life Top Gun academy no longer exists. He also pointed out that it the time between the creation of the Top Gun school and the “Top Gun” movie (1969 – 1986) is briefer than the time between the “Top Gun” movie and the present day (1986 – 2006). Freaky.
Finished Sunday, June 18th, 2006
Copyright (c) 2006 Friday & Saturday Night
Back to home.