“Your reputation precedes you.”

Top Gun: Maverick -- The long anticipated [if not exactly asked for] sequel to the 1986, high-flying, teeth-gnashing, suntan-lotion-dripping, one-hour-and-fifty-minute long... Navy advertisement, Top Gun. While the original film features some truly stellar aerial combat scenes, the more terrestrial parts of the film are… Well, let’s just say they won’t take your breath away.

Maverick, however… is equally vapid, overlong, and forgettable while still managing to improve upon the recipe of the original in nearly every way. That being said, as an experience rather than a film, Top Gun: Maverick is one helluva ride.

As most nostalgia-bait sequels do, Maverick over-relies on the already established feelings of its audience towards the main characters, and does nothing to develop them [or anyone else in the film] further -- the things you know about characters in the beginning are the same things you know about them by the end. bada bing bada boom, jet go fast yeeha.

The film features some very clunky and out of place editing that I can only hope was an intentional call-back to the original and the story is one of the laziest pieces of writing I’ve seen since… I can’t even remember. Featuring exposed exhaust ports to secret bases run by generic copy/paste bad guys in black, and conflicts that have 0 consequences for either success or failure; it feels as though a 17-year old who’d never seen A New Hope watched Force Awakens for the first time and thought, “Oh man, this is some good stuff. I gotta write something just like this,” not realizing that Force is just Hope 1.2 already.

The completely weightless plot is especially confounding given that the film opens with an interesting internal conflict… and then never develops or visits it again.

“But Cacciato-Re-Views,” I hear you protesting, “who cares about the plot of an action movie!?” And I hear you. So, let’s talk about the split rating on this.

As a film — as a piece of visual narrative and artistic meaning — Top Gun: Maverick is really, really quite bad. The plot is drivel, takes too long to matter, and has no payoff or consequences regardless of which way the conflict goes. It’s dumb. But… as an experience…

There have never been cooler action scenes or more technically incredible aerial photography shots in all of human history. The flying is intense and incredibly well crafted, the sound is well mixed and engaging, and the sense of speed in each and every moment is so pure that you will literally be gritting your teeth as you watch this film. Despite checking my watch 90-minutes into this movie and audibly groaning in the theater, I still found myself tense and amped at the end of each and every flight sequence.

If you've ever played Ace Combat or have even a passing interest in flight, you are going to LOVE this movie.

For me though, I wish the film had been more even. I could have taken some slightly less cool action for a slightly more intelligent and engaging plot. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't expecting something like Nine Days or Portrait of a Lady on Fire here, but I would have liked something less... dumb.

I could have used a little less mind-blowing aerial cinematography for some equally less boring and distracting editing and ground shots. The film seems to rapidly cycle between portrait-worthy stills of characters, machines, and landscapes, and completely forgettable and lazy shots, not to mention the absolutely ham-fisted use of flashback footage from the original movie.

Top gun: Maverick is a great action movie alongside other modern genre-giants like Mad Max: Fury Road and John Wick. Where it falls short of those however, is that it’s too bloated and too flat to make up ground during its high intensity and brilliant action sequences. I wish it was just, better... or shorter.

While Maverick does greatly improve on the original in every imaginable way; improving on a film that is nigh unwatchable… doesn’t really give you much altitude.

“Having fun yet?”