Cruise Control: TOP GUN: MAVERICK

The secret sauce of Top Gun’s appeal is that it’s hard and soft, mechanical and sentimental, gear-headed and soft-hearted. There’s militarism and macho posturing among students at a Naval flight academy, with as much attention to glistening bodies as the planes’ chassis. But it is balanced out with a cocky young pilot’s attempts at wooing a woman out of his range, and his wing-mate’s loving relationship with a doting wife and son. Sure, a mysterious Other is out there, and the military needs to train these men to fight it. But there’s the homeland to be tended in the meantime, too. Tony Scott made this movie of fast planes and smirking retorts drip with montage and soft rock, an extended advertisement for itself. But the sneaky romantic core is surely what made it popular. And embracing that is what makes the long-awaited sequel Top Gun: Maverick even better. This time around, director Joseph Kosinski—whose great resume is a perfect preparation for the task, with a belated and much-improved sequel to an 80s favorite, Tron: Legacy; a Tom Cruise action spectacle, Oblivion; and a men-at-dangerous-work, process-oriented tearjerker Only the Brave—precisely calibrates the requirements and delivers a movie that’s muscular, delicate, and relentlessly, manipulatively satisfying.

The 36-year gap between the original and this sequel has necessitate a more mature approach. I’m glad they didn’t try to claim Cruise’s hotshot pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is still a youthful paragon of gleaming, arrogant precociousness. That was the typical Cruise role at the beginning of his stardom, but Maverick finds him willing to admit to his age. Much like the Mission: Impossibles’ later entries really took off once Cruise was willing to make his hero small in the frame, a perpetual underdog just scraping by in, well, impossible tasks, this sequel finds Maverick at the other end of a long career. We hear that, after graduating Top Gun, he served overseas multiple times, and is now working as a test pilot for experimental planes. He also still bristles at authority, which means he remains a Captain after all these years. He knows he needs to placate the brass (Ed Harris, Jon Hamm) just enough to keep him in the cockpit of really cool, really fast planes. But he’s also enough of a hotshot to want to push the limits wherever he can. This brings him back to Top Gun as an instructor, a punishment, perhaps, for one more clash with a direct order, or salvation, perhaps, on the part of an old friend (Val Kilmer) who sticks up for him one more time. Is there still room for a hero like Maverick, in a program for a kind of air combat that’s less a pressing issue in a world of drones and insurgencies? And does he have what it takes, not merely to prove himself, but to prepare the best-of-the-best for a dangerous mission that’d be certain suicide if they can’t master his techniques?

This allows for a movie that’s a more relaxed and gentle story about fathers and mentors and hoping to make up for old mistakes and prove one’s relevance to a new generation. (The movie’s definitely self-aware there.) The youthful energy of the first picture is now off to the sides, and centered on others. Throughout it leans on Cruise’s age by letting him play something like a normal person instead of a gleaming hero. He’s surrounded by younger trainees, including one (Miles Teller) who is the son of a fallen character from the original. This complicates the emotional valances of the training. Cruise wants to help these students survive by teaching them to pull off nearly-impossible maneuvers—tight, vertiginous dives and steep, face-melting climbs. But his understanding of the costs of this job, and this mission, makes him reluctant to put them in danger at all. He feels like he owes it to his late friend’s son. But here’s a movie about making things right from your past, and finding people to help along the way. It’s most expressive in the warm middle-aged romance on the margins, as Maverick reconnects with an old fling, an admiral’s daughter who is now a glowing, bar-owning, single mother (Jennifer Connelly). This is just one more way the movie sets up cliche and diverges into unexpected heart. What in the previous film would be a quick flirt is now a slow smolder, and where the lovemaking montage should be is instead a montage of small talk. How sweet. Later, as he sneaks out, the woman’s teen daughter stares down the old man and, right when you think she’d snark, instead says, “Don’t break her heart again.”

Because the movie so genuinely believes in the emotions of these cardboard types, it sells the stakes. It builds setups and pays them off with aplomb. The training sequences, shot in convincing aerial stunts, are a beguiling mechanical spectacle. And even if the ultimate mission is geopolitically preposterous, it’s still a gripping and tense spectacle of planes and missiles for an extended action climax. It comes down to a militaristic fantasy of faceless bad guys from a nameless country to whom consequence-free violence can be committed without larger global complications. (This is the way it has to be for our global film marketplace, but recall the original was similarly cagey; they both have all the specificity of a recruitment ad.) But because the picture is so elegantly manipulative, with its gooey warm sentiment powering the interpersonal dynamics, and the hard-charging dogfights and explosions of the finale so muscularly deployed and crisply cut, that it’s hard not to get swept up in its concussive artifice. All that and a soaring power-ballad pounding over the end credits, too? That’s the perfect combination of hard and soft for which you go to a movie like this.

Stuck on the Runway: PLANES

I’ve never found the world of Pixar’s Cars movies to be all that difficult to believe. It’s Earth, but every living thing is a vehicle. Of course the level of realism is close to nonexistent, but you know what else isn’t real? Talking cars. There comes a point where you aren’t picking away at the plausibility of a fantasy world and you’re just simply resisting the premise. When people wonder, say, how cars managed to build a cathedral or why they’d need farms, well, there’s no good answer other than “they just do.” Those questions simply don’t bother me because the world of Cars and Cars 2 is nothing more than a moderately clever spin on ours that’s only use is as a backdrop for fast-paced sequences of comedy and excitement vividly brought to life through Pixar’s typically virtuosic attention to animated detail and terrific sound effects. That they aren’t deep Pixar doesn’t mean they aren’t enjoyable in their own right. They’re cartoony and operate within their own cracked world perfectly. I choose to believe in it because I find them fun enough to avoid nitpicky questions.

Planes, on the other hand, is the movie that people who don’t like the Cars movies think they are. It’s a junk heap of cliché and distractingly haphazard approach to keeping the fantasy world making some sort of consistent internal sense. If nothing else, I hope it’ll help some Cars haters realize that, at the very least, those movies aren’t this bad. Pixar has had bad buzz around their recent sequels and prequels, as if follow-ups are inherently uncreative. I don’t think that’s the case. Nor do I think that they’re forced to make movies they don’t want to make. Proof is Planes, which is a spinoff of the Cars movies that was punted to their corporate sibling Disney Animation to cook up as a direct-to-DVD release. For some reason this on-the-cheap piece of rote animated family filmmaking has been deemed worthy of the big screen. Maybe Disney had an opening on the schedule they needed filling or hoped that it could cushion the blow of the mega-budgeted The Lone Ranger should it flop. (It did, but don’t let that stop you from seeing it if you haven’t. It’s very good.)

Watching Planes had me questioning aspects of this universe I’d never contemplated before. It’s the story of a crop-duster (Dane Cook) who’d really like to be a racing plane. With the encouragement of a fuel truck (Brad Garrett), a forklift (Teri Hatcher), and a World War II (really) fighter plane (Stacy Keach), he enters an international globetrotting race filled with lazy cultural shorthand for contestants and destinations. The crop-duster is laughed at until he starts to make progress and win friends with his good heart. But isn’t this world one with a great deal of predetermination? If you’re born a crop-duster, don’t you have some mechanical limitations that could never be overcome? If you’re born a train, a popemobile, or a jumbo jet, isn’t your job pretty much set? Cars finds a racecar learning to enjoy life in the slow lane, while Cars 2 finds a tow truck mistaken for a secret agent. But neither advocates them doing things they’re just not built to do.

I realize it doesn’t make a good kid’s film moral to say that these vehicles are built to do certain jobs and should be happy with their lot in life, but isn’t that what’s happening here? To claim otherwise is to promote willful ignorance about the way life in car-land is built. This world has a pretty rigid caste system. Why else would a forklift (Sinbad) and the other racers (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, John Cleese, Priyanka Chopra, Cedric the Entertainer, Carlos Alazraqui, and Roger Craig Smith) relentlessly mock the crop-duster for his God-given technical specifications? So what happens when a vehicle goes into the shop? Is it major surgery to improve the engine block? How about getting outfitted with shiny new aerodynamic wings? Plastic surgery or performance enhancement? There’s a deeply strange moment when the crop-duster is worried about removing his sprayer to improve his speed.

If there had been anything distinctive or enjoyable about this movie I probably wouldn’t have been stuck contemplating the underlying philosophy and countless technical details of this fantasy world. I also found myself asking why this world even needs crops, let alone crop-dusters and, in the vehicular World War II, what type of car was Hitler? A shot of the New York City skyline had me briefly wonder what happened in this world on 9/11. I realize these aren’t questions the target audience is likely to be asking, but I had to do something to keep my mind active. It’s not often a studio approves its own cheap knockoff, but here one is anyways. The animation is vanilla, the plotting achingly predictable and painfully simple, and the moralizing cheap, sentimental, and tone-deaf. (The only mildly enjoyable touch is the casting of Anthony Edwards and Val Kilmer as Top Gun fighter jets.) Director Klay Hall and screenwriter Jeffrey M. Howard (responsible for three direct-to-DVD Tinkerbell movies between the two of them) have made a movie that’s nothing more than a timewaster, a space-filler, and, worst-case scenario, a babysitter. Kids deserve better than this lame hunk of junk. 

Quick Look: MACGRUBER

In painfully unfunny, and mercifully brief, skits on Saturday Night Live, Will Forte plays MacGruber, an incompetent hero with overconfidence and an easily distractible disposition. The short scenes involving frantic attempts to diffuse a bomb play out in interchangeable bunkers that will unfailingly, as the final punchline, explode. Now, in the first SNL film in nearly a decade, MacGruber, while dramatically increasing the crudeness and violence of the skits, creates a loud, specific parody of loud 1980’s action movies, the kind that were ridiculous to begin with. Under the direction of an SNL writer making his feature debut, Jorma Taccone, the movie pays plenty of attention to the tropes of the 80’s action movie in style and form. Here is a comedy that consistently looks and sounds like a typical action outing. It’s a parody of overblown, over-the-top action filmmaking. A few summers ago, Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz got huge laughs with the same basic concept by using truly well-staged action to highlight both the pleasure and the ridiculousness of the genre. MacGruber takes a different approach, constantly undercutting the pleasure of the action without having any jokes to fill the void. It becomes a sparsely amusing comedy and a thoroughly unexciting action movie. Despite willfully glib work from Val Kilmer and Powers Boothe (just two of the painfully obvious casting callbacks to the 80’s), and despite the earnest efforts of Kristen Wiig and Ryan Phillipe (as sidekicks), the movie ultimately fails because there are no funny situations in which to put the characters. Forte’s MacGruber is the only zany character in the entire film, bouncing through semi-serious set-pieces with a cast determined to play everything as if it were an action film. (The exception is Maya Rudolph, who shows up only briefly and is therefore easily the most tolerable). As the sole intended source of humor, outside of bad puns and silly names, MacGruber himself becomes grating and annoying fairly quickly, leaving for the exasperated audience’s enjoyment only a thin action plot and a series of gaps where the laughter should be.

Un-Caged: BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS

The last several years have proven that there is a large market for bad Nicolas Cage thrillers. Remember National Treasure? Ghost Rider? Bangkok Dangerous? National Treasure: Book of Secrets? They all opened at the top of the box office charts on their opening weekend despite being largely terrible. For some reason, the general public will only see Cage if he has odd intensity and likably exaggerated mannerisms tied to a thin character wading through schlock. He’s a great actor though, so it’s a shame that his best projects have a tendency to slip through the cracks. In theory, that shouldn’t have happened to Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which is at once a very good sleazy thriller and a perfectly marketable film. Why, then, has the film seen only a small limited release and is now being limped out on DVD and Blu-ray? Maybe it’s because it happens to be so cheerfully wicked in its insanity.

Helmed by the great German auteur, and suspected crazy person, Werner Herzog, the movie features Cage as a New Orleans cop who injures his back saving a prisoner during Hurricane Katrina. This cop gets addicted to his painkillers and then starts to self-medicate in addition to his prescriptions by lifting some confiscated cocaine from the evidence room. Soon, he’s wandering the ravaged streets of New Orleans, lifting drugs off of unsuspecting addicts and snorting it right in front of them. He tortures and badgers witnesses and suspects, barks out orders, makes backroom deals and bargains, and generally looks at the world through a stare of vague, bug-eyed intensity.  Also, he’s investigating the brutal killings of an entire immigrant family.

Herzog and Cage don’t care much about making this man likable, or even relatable, but they aren’t following him down increasingly depraved paths like Abel Ferrara did with Harvey Keitel in their Bad Lieutenant (1992), a film that’s related to this one in name only. (The Bad Lieutenant part of the title was forced on the picture by a producer with the subtitle Herzog’s idea). Instead, Cage simply presents a man ravaged by circumstance and temperament, mirroring the locale. Herzog’s camera follows his central character through a crumbled and waterlogged city filled with slimy characters and creatures (including hallucinated iguanas and a twitching crocodile corpse), that match the decaying mental state of this bad lieutenant. New Orleans is a place of harsh beauty for Herzog as he uses his usual “voodoo of location” to great effect, not to mention skilful use of his beloved man-versus-wild imagery, not just in the iguanas and crocodiles, but also from the slimy snake the slips through dirty water in the opening scene and the film’s final shot with two men dwarfed by a sinisterly tranquil aquarium.

Often, a Herzog film will become more interesting the more it drifts away from the ostensible point of the scene.  Take, for example, his wonderful Antarctic documentary Encounters at the End of the World in which he places his narration over an interview to explain how lengthy and rambling the interview became. While Port of Call New Orleans remains a luxurious wallow in low genre pleasures and a seriously cracked procedural, there are plenty of excellent moments where the camera drifts away and maybe the plot will follow it. There are plenty of welcome detours, like the aforementioned iguanas that only Cage can see, and there are lots of rich parts for character actors. Jennifer Coolidge unexpectedly turns up playing Cage’s stepmom, but there are plenty of other strange and fascinating moments with a cast of characters that includes a drug dealer (Xzibit), Cage’s coworkers (which include Val Kilmer and Michael Shannon), and a prostitute (Eva Mendes).

This is a film of debauched anecdotes and bizarre incidents, of terrible criminals and sometimes worse officials. It plays like a conventional cop film that happens to be on about as many drugs as are in its main character. Herzog charges the film with his usual intensity of specificity and Cage brings a great performance of the kind that he is capable of delivering, but many recent roles have either misused or reined in. When you have two entertainers as eccentric, engaging and unpredictable as Cage and Herzog, it’s startling, maybe even a little disappointing, to see that, though they create a strange and captivating thriller, it seems to still pull up short. These are two men who could push each other so far over the top that the film would be in free fall. They only get us to the precipice, but what a lovely, beautifully schlocky view.