Top Gun: Maverick is better — and nicer — than the 1986 original

polygon.com:

“I don’t like that look, Mav,” says Warrant Officer Bernie “Hondo” Coleman (Bashir Salahuddin) as Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) settles into the cockpit of an experimental plane early in Top Gun: Maverick. Just as in the original 1986 Top Gun, Maverick is about to disobey orders. This time, he intends to take his sleek black aircraft on a Mach 10 test flight. The look Hondo doesn’t like to see in Cruise’s green eyes is one of daring, heedless resolve, and one thousand percent commitment. “It’s the only one I got,” Maverick says.

That statement describes Cruise as well. It’s hard to think of another actor who has so relentlessly chiseled away at his onscreen personality over the course of a career until there’s nothing left but a single-minded, single-sided icon.

Cruise was always protective of his image, but he used to be ambitious and hungry enough for recognition as an actor that he was willing to take risks. In his 1980s heyday, he had a “no guns, no sequels” rule to force himself to keep moving, and to keep a dramatic impulse at the heart of his work. He worked with such legendary directors as Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, and Steven Spielberg, and challenged his self-image in the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia and Michael Mann’s Collateral. But the Oscar he craved never came.

Seeing the future of franchise entertainment coming, Cruise built the Mission: Impossible series around himself as both star and producer. The guns and the sequels started lining up. After Cruise’s spasm of self-parody in Tropic Thunder and Rock of Ages, his attempts to interrogate his own persona or to convey human qualities beyond heroism and determination dried up. In films these days, he clenches his jaw, runs