“Top Gun: Maverick” (M) *

IT’S 35 years since Tom Cruise launched the “Top Gun” aerial circus playing US Navy aviator Lt Pete “Maverick” Mitchell.

This sequel runs, including credits, for 131 minutes. A couple of Uncle Sam’s admirals think the US Navy’s pilots should destroy an unnamed enemy and an unnamed target. 

The flight plan sounds and looks crackers, requiring every “Top Gun” rookie (the top pilots in the greatest air force anywhere on the planet – don’t ask me – that’s what the dialogue says!) to fly at high speed and dangerously low altitudes. But can it be done?

Well, it’s going to be done. And at the US Navy’s Flight Training School, now Capt Pete Mitchell is going to teach them how to do it. In all those intervening years, he’s only gone up one rank – he’d rather fly an aircraft capable of flying at Mach 10 than a desk. 

I’m no physicist with knowledge of how Mach numbers are measured and why they’re significant, but I understand that they do not on their own measure how fast an aircraft is flying. The film’s first serious flying sequence involves Maverick flying at a speed reaching Mach 10. Twaddle and buschwah. For me the rest was a waste of time and space that didn’t get any better after that.

And what idiot would ride a powerful motorbike bare-headed – no helmet – and wearing Levis, not leathers? Maverick would!

As the movie wore on, an impression began building in my mind. It looks like an advertisement for a US Navy recruitment campaign. I’ve read that all the flying sequences were shot for real. Watch them. Get a buzz from them. 

Here’s what “Sight and Sound”, as reliable a movie magazine as any, more so than most, said about “TGMAV”: “The new ‘Top Gun’ mission is pretty much an analogue of … ‘Star Wars’ as Mav and pals have to launch a strike against a ground-based Death Star… soap sub-plots are presented in basic, straight-faced-but-gigglesome fashion that often feel like sly spoof. Less ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ than ‘Hot Shots! Part Trois’.”

At all cinemas