Alan Mattli’s review published on Letterboxd:
If Top Gun is a gorgeously sun-drenched hangout movie with occasional action beats and a somewhat anticlimatic dogfight tacked onto the end, Top Gun: Maverick is a more focused, more streamlined, more straightforward action movie in the 2010s Mission: Impossible mode – with all the implications that come with that, both good and bad – that is dotted with almost uncharacteristic dramatic breaks, where it takes its time to contemplate its relationship with its predecessor.
On paper, I think I prefer the former proposition, but in practice, there is a lot to be said for how Maverick handles its status as a legacy sequel, its aging star, and the looming realisation that much about it – including said star – is, ultimately, an anachronism. And while I think that its melodramatic beats fall flat more or less as often as they work, and that Joseph Kosinski's visual sensibilities are significantly less exciting than Tony Scott's, I can't argue with the results here. Tom Cruise's arc – and it really feels like it's Cruise's more than Maverick's – yields a bunch of poignant moments ("unchanged men in a changing world" is an evergreen, and if, as in Cruise's case, the meta-context makes the theme transcend the screen, it works all the better); and virtually every one of those kinetic, emphatically physical flight sequences had me on the edge of my seat – especially those final 30-odd minutes, which are a joyful celebration of pretty much everything Tom Cruise has come to stand for over the years.