Knee-jerk review: "Top Gun Maverick"

1. With the fade in comes that one familiar chime (you know the one) over a percolating drum machine and it's like getting enveloped in a warm 80s cocoon.
2. This is what popcorn Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking looks like, people.  Big stunts, big emotions, big drama.  It cooks.
3. The core of the movie explores the lingering grief surroundings Goose's unexpected death in the original movie, which may be uninspired (we also get the expected insults to Maverick that he's, like, a dinosaur) but it certainly seems appropriate.
4. Ms. Fry rightly pointed out that the mission our heroes undertake here - an air strike in a foreign country - would likely be considered an act of war. 
5. This is surely the most likable that Miles Teller has even been on screen.  To us, his performances usually default to smarmy creep.
6. We don't want to spoil it and say "Danger Zone" appears on the soundtrack... but "Danger Zone" appears on the soundtrack.  Revvin' up your engine, listen to her howlin' roar.
7. Poor Val Kilmer.
8. We did the online game where you're given a Top Gun-style call sign.  Ours was Hatchet.  How lame is that?
9. It's one of those movies where you can't help but wonder how the heck did they film this?  Some of the camera angles seem utterly impossible.
10. Jennifer Connelly is as luminous as ever.  Sigh.
11. That football game on the beach makes no sense.
12. We're getting rusty.  That pitch perfect climax should have been so totally obvious, yet we didn't see it coming.
13. There's dramatic license and then there's the necessary plot point here that asks audiences to believe that American fighter jets are suddenly technologically inferior to this unnamed foreign country.  We ain't buying it.
14. "Talk to me, Goose."
15. There really is a bar where you have to buy everyone a round if you have your cell phone on the bar.  The mugs hanging from the ceiling belong to active aviators - you get the mug when you get your call sign.
16. All this, plus Ed Harris and Jon Hamm glowering in Navy uniforms.
17. We're not crying, you're crying.

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