‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Review: Tom Cruise Takes to the Skies, Literally, in Barrier-Breaking Sequel

The world is not the same place it was in 1986, when “Top Gun” ruled the box office. In Ronald Reagan, America had a movie star for a president, and producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson as its honorary ministers of propaganda. The same year that “Platoon” challenged the United States’ militaristic track record, “Top Gun” sold a thrilling if narrow-minded fantasy of American exceptionalism — of boys and their toys, of no-homo bromance and what it means to be the best. Three years after Tom Cruise flipped the bird to a Russian MiG fighter plane, the Berlin Wall fell. Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed.One could argue that our new, post-Cold War world didn’t need a “Top Gun” sequel. (Tom Cruise himself once insisted as much.) But one would be wrong to do so. Building on the three-parts-steel-to-one-part-corn equation that director Tony Scott so effectively set 36 years earlier, ...