This is one of the worst movies I’ve seen, and certainly one of the most soulless. The premise of it is, “hey, remember Top Gun? What if we did that again?”

So you get Goose Jr. playing “Great Balls of Fire” on a piano in a bar, you get sweaty shirtless beach sports (football this time), you get Maverick doing a fly-by on the tower and being generally insubordinate, you get Tom Cruise racing an airplane on his motorcycle at sunset, you get an opening that’s literally just a reprise of the first movie and wholly unrelated to anything, you get Danger Zone, it’s all just totally rote.

And of course, the whole point of the movie is that Tom Cruise is the coolest pilot who ever lived and even though he’s old now, he’s still magically better than any of the young whippersnapper kids who are the best of their era (and by a lot). Because, sure, fighter pilot is famously a job dominated by sixty-year-olds. It’s an absurd fantasy for the old men who remember being young when they saw the first movie.

As for the plot, the less said the better. It’s mostly a mix of the first movie and Star Wars — they have to fly down a trench and fire missiles into a small vent — but with some extra absurdities thrown in for no reason. (Why does the never-named “enemy” have a 1980s-era plane just like the one Tom Cruise flew in the first movie fueled up, in perfect working condition, and fully armed, just sitting in a military airport on their base? Other than “because the writers wanted them to.”)

We laughed throughout the movie, but definitely at it and never with it. Absolute unmitigated garbage, only watchable if you are looking for trash. Back when it came out, I read a lot of relatively positive things about this movie, but I have to assume that critics were just desperate for anything that wasn’t a Marvel movie at the time, because I have no other explanation for any kind reviews.