Run, Tom Cruise, run! Run he does in Dead Reckoning Part One.
Last summer, the movie business had been all but pronounced dead. Conventional wisdom said that audiences, locked out of theaters by the Covid pandemic (remember that?), were now permanently captured by streamers. Then Top Gun: Maverick roared into wide release to the tune of $1.5 billion, and by the end of the year, Paramount had reversed course, proclaiming that the studio would only produce films intended for theatrical release.
The rest of 2022 and 2023 have turned out to be fairly average years, box-office-wise. Numbers are down from 2019, which was a banner year thanks to Avengers: Endgame, but nothing like the catastrophe of 2021. Then, there were the twin failures of Ant-Manand The Wasp: Quantumania, which lost Marvel/Disney $120 million, and the $200-million bath Warner Bros. took on The Flash, which may end up being the biggest box office flop of all time.
Then, on May 2nd, the Writers Guild of America went on strike against the studios, and last week, the Screen Actors Guild joined them on the picket lines. Now, the doom and gloom is back in Tinseltown. The problem that the last few months has exposed is this: The alleged break-even point for a film like The Flash is $600 million. (I say “alleged” because “Hollywood accounting” is synonymous with “lying.”) This is not a business model; it’s a gambling addiction. And none of it is the fault of the writers who are paid a pittance by the flailing gamblers, or the actors, most of whom don’t earn the $27,000 a year necessary to qualify for SAG’s health insurance.
Enter Tom Cruise and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Director Christopher McQuarrie and the returning Impossible Mission Force had their budget and schedule blown by Covid delays, but promised a big on-screen payoff. They delivered on that promise.
The film’s dense, fast-moving cold open harkens back to the franchise’s roots as a Cold War-era spy series. The Sevastopol, a Russian nuclear submarine testing out a new AI-powered stealth system, is discovered and fired upon by an American sub. When they return fire, the American sub is revealed to be a WarGames-style computer mirage, and their own torpedo turns against them. Meanwhile, back in Washington, CIA Director Kittridge (Henry Czerny, returning) is briefing DNI Denlinger (Cary Elwes) on the Entity, a cyberweapon that achieved sentience and escaped into the wilds of the internet after sinking the Sevastopol. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, running) is dispatched to retrieve a key that may be the key to controlling the rogue AI. But Hunt and IMF ops Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames, sitting) have other ideas. Burned by six films’ worth of betrayal and disavowal at the hands of their bosses, they decide that no one can be trusted with the Entity’s power, and vow to destroy it.
MI represents both the good and the bad of Hollywood in 2023. It is a $295-million film in a 25-year-old franchise built around an aging movie star and an intellectual property whose origin few remember. But unlike butt-ugly CGI fests like The Flash and Quantumania, all that money is on the screen. Yes, there’s CGI in MI, but that’s really Tom Cruise jumping a motorcycle off a cliff in the Alps. When the climax pays tribute to The General, they really drive a locomotive off a real bridge, just like Buster Keaton. Yes, it’s too long (geez, this is only part one?), but the story is clear and the editing brisk. Unlike too many big-budget gambles, I never felt bored and ripped off. Plus, Tom Cruise fighting an AI in the middle of a strike triggered by a threat to replace actors and writers with AI is just too perfect. I’m rooting for Cruise.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One Now playing Multiple locations
Kelly McGillis and Tom Cruise hug it out in Top Gun.
Muck Sticky is a Memphis rap legend. He has traveled the world bringing his party music to the stoned masses, and he shows no signs of letting up. He just released his 16th album, the 22-track Man in Pajamas.
Back before the pandemic delayed the release of Top Gun: Maverick, Muck mentioned to me that he had never seen the original Top Gun. I asked if he would do a “Never Seen It” with me. Now, more than two years later, The Sticky Muck joined me remotely from his new place on the beach in central Florida to watch Tony Scott’s 1986 summer blockbuster. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Chris McCoy: Tell me what you know about Top Gun.
Muck Sticky: I don’t know much. I know the “Danger Zone” song is from Top Gun, I did watch Hot Shots! a whole lot when I was growing up. Mostly what I know about Top Gun is what I saw in Hot Shots!, so I’m hoping it lives up to it.
CM: Well, that’s a unique perspective. You’re going to get some jokes that never made sense before. So, why haven’t you seen Top Gun? Is it just one of those things that you missed over the years?
MS: In all honesty, growing up, my cousin liked Top Gun a whole lot, and I didn’t like my cousin. So I just kind of didn’t want to watch it.
CM: Okay, we’ll see if that instinct was right!
110 minutes later…
CM: Muck Sticky, you are now a person who has seen Top Gun. What did you think?
MS: I went to the Danger Zone and took out all the MiGs!
CM: Was it what you thought it was going to be?
MS: I expected a whole lot of flying montages, and there were a lot of those, with music. That was pretty cool. I totally get a lot more of the Hot Shots! references now! It makes a whole lot more sense.
CM: Of course, the flying sequences are just incredible.
MS: Fantastic! Great footage! [Jerry} Bruckheimer, I see why he’s stayed as prominent in the industry as he has.
CM: Bruckheimer is responsible for the most expensive movie ever made. You know what it was?
MS: No.
CM: It’s Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides—$410 million.
MS: Wow.
CM: The director was Tony Scott, who was Ridley Scott’s brother. His movies always looked incredible.
MS: The cinematography is amazing. I found myself really getting into the just the way it looked over all, you know? Especially those epic shots where he’s riding the motorcycle with the sunset behind him. It’s kind of silhouetted. I mean, I’ve seen those images, before but seeing the movie in its complete form is really spectacular. I was thoroughly impressed.
CM: Those motorcycle shots… I probably haven’t seen this movie since the nineties. It’s been a long time. This time, I noticed the motorcycle shots. It’s the same shot, like, three or four times. He’s going around a corner and going down a street with palm trees. He probably spent an afternoon driving around in circles. It was like, “OK, Tom! Go around the block one more time!”
“Drive around the block one more time, Tom!”
MS: Boy, they really got their money’s worth on the licenses for “Take My Breath Away” and “Danger Zone” and “Great Balls of Fire” and “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” I think I heard those songs a half a dozen times.
CM: Let’s talk about the music, because the soundtrack was a very big deal.
MS: I really liked hearing a lot of Memphis in there—Otis Redding “Sitting on The Dock of the Bay” and, of course, “Great Balls of Fire!”
CM: Harold Faltermeyer was responsible for the synth score. My high school marching band did a medley of “Danger Zone”, “Take My Breath Away”, and the “Top Gun Theme.” What did you think about the synth score?
MS: Yeah, it was cool. I can see where Stranger Things and modern shows that are going back to that stuff came from. There’s even bands that are using that sort of sound, and I can see where that score inspired a lot of stuff.
I love a score that has a feel to it, that gives the movie a feeling. I think he captured it really well. It fits the movie perfectly, you know what I mean? I didn’t ever catch myself noticing, you’re watching a movie. You want to get lost in a movie, and I got lost in it. It’s hard to do that. I’m usually taken out of it, whether it’s from bad acting or music that doesn’t fit. There are several movies where I feel like certain musical elements don’t fit, like Django Unchained — “100 Black Coffins,” the Rick Ross song, just doesn’t fit. It takes me out of the movie.
CM: I totally get it. I’m the same way. The Dune movie that came out last year was great in every respect, except the score. It’s Hans Zimmer, who has done a lot of great stuff. But the score was just like…
MS: I’ve seen the old Dune.
CM: This one is a lot better than the old one. I love you, David Lynch. I’m sorry to say this in a public forum, but yeah, the Dennis Villeneuve Dune a lot better than the old one, except for the score. It was just a puddle of mush, didn’t shape it at all for me. I kept noticing how good the score was in Top Gun, though. You were right — it is all montage. The aerial photography, first of all, is amazing, right? But if you think about it, all they had was planes flying around and doing various maneuvers. They had to put all that together in the editing room to try and make it look like there’s a dogfight going on.
MS: Back in those days, they just sent guys up with cameras like, just shoot a bunch of stuff and we’ll figure out how to make it work.
CM: That’s exactly what happened, and to a certain extent that’s what happened with Top Gun: Maverick too! It’s always been like that, though. Have you ever seen The Aviator? Martin Scorsese?
MS: Yeah, for sure! Leonardo! I love that one.
CM: There’s that bit of where they’re filming Hell’s Angels, waiting all day to fly the combat sequences until the clouds were right. Because if there’s no clouds, you can’t tell if anything’s moving.
MS: You talked about the motorcycle shots being duplicates, but I noticed a few of those “target locking onto the aircraft” shots were duplicates, too.
CM: Or it’ll be the same shot, but it’s flipped left to right? I probably wouldn’t notice as much if I weren’t married to a film editor.
MS: I probably wouldn’t had I not edited a couple of films and so many music videos! But, you know, I love it. I feel you on being connected to editing. For me, that’s the magic of movies. You script something out, then you capture sometimes more and sometimes less than what you were hoping for. When you get home, you have to craft it in a way that makes sense. For them to just send guys up with some cameras saying, ‘Get what you can and we’ll make it work in the story,’ man…It was really pieced together very well, I thought.
Tom Cruise feels positive emotions about his F-14 in Top Gun.
CM: Young Tom Cruise. Now, he’s old Tom Cruise, but he still looks good. In Top Gun, he looks noticeably younger.
MS: Oh, yeah, for sure.
CM: What did you think about Maverick, and Tom Cruise’s performance in general?
MS: To be honest, it didn’t get me right away. I felt like everybody else was doing more acting than he was. But then there was the scene when Goose died — spoiler alert, I guess!
CM: It’s cool. The whole thing about “Never Seen It” is that everybody else has seen it except you.
MS: When Goose died, and he was got emotional about that, I felt like he was more upset about it than Meg Ryan’s character was, and she was his wife. I really bought into it. I did notice his unibrow quite a bit. I didn’t know he sported the unibrow so hard back in the day.
CM: One man, one brow, I say.
MS: I guess it kind of goes with his uni-tooth in the front too.
CM: What!?
MS: So I don’t know if you ever noticed, but his teeth are kind of aligned to one side. Like, there’s one that’s directly in the center.
CM: Oh god. I won’t be able to see anything else but that now.
Don’t look away from Tom Cruise as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun.
MS: But he’s Tom Cruise! He’s is the biggest movie star on the planet! I think that’s right. Is he the biggest one? Who’s the biggest movie star on the planet?
CM: It’s got to be him. He’s going to make $100 million off Maverick, Who can compete with that?
MS: I’m going to see Maverick. It’s still in theaters, right?
CM: Yeah.
MS: We have an IMAX here, so I’m going to go check it out this week. I’ve got Hot Shots! pulled up right now!
CM: To me, Top Gun is the most Eighties thing ever made, the distillation of the Reagan eighties. There’s this military worship, but it’s also incredibly individualistic and competitive.
MS: Everybody’s competing with everybody at all times.
CM: It makes being a dick look like virtue. Maverick is a complete dick. If you watch a lot of Eighties movies, you’ll notice the protagonist is usually an asshole. Like Purple Rain — which is one of my favorite movies of all times, but if you think about it, Prince’s arc is, he’s a complete asshole at the beginning, and he’s slightly less of an asshole at the end.
MS: Just slightly.
CM: He’s improving, and I guess it’s the same for Maverick. When he’s a wingman, he abandons his flight leader, and that ends badly. The second time, he’s a good wingman. He learned the lesson when it counted.
MS: That’s kind of like what the Hero’s Journey is about. Any mono-myth is about taking a guy who’s already one way and transforming him into something else. He has to change through the arc of the story. The Eighties, back then everybody was very, very competitive. I don’t know what the right word is for it, is but for me, artistry is about helping us find our softer sides, the better side of ourselves. Working through our pain to find our better selves. I think moviemakers and musicians and artists across the board take what’s going on currently in the world, and try to express how they feel it could be better, you know?
CM: Yep.
MS: Maybe that’s why he learned that lesson and becomes a little bit better of a dude, throughout the course of the movie. He ends up hugging his rival.
CM: Yep.
MS: The end, that’s the artist in the movie maker, wanting people that are rivals and competitors to bond and be friends. We’re on the same side here. That’s what we, as artists, want to do in the world: we take the division, and we want to create unity, you know? That’s what I do in my music — I want to bring people together through music.
CM: You think art should ultimately have a pro-social message.
MS: I guess so. The evidence is there that we’re always going to be competitive. That never goes away. But at the same time, you get that good feeling when he says, ‘You can be my wingman!’ ‘No, you can be mine!’ and they hug.
CM: You just made me think of something. Top Gun is a product of the late Cold War — the Reagan eighties, American capitalism, competition, and individualism. And it was borderline propaganda for the Navy.
MS: Maybe not just borderline!
CM: Right, so have you ever seen Battleship Potemkin? It’s a Russian movie made in 1927 about a mutiny against the Tsar that started on a ship in Odessa harbor. It’s definitely a Soviet propaganda movie. There’s not a central protagonist. There’s not a guy who you focus on and follow his story the whole time. It’s all about the movement of groups of people who decided together to rebel against the Tsar. You can see the values of these two societies — or at least the values these societies thought had propaganda value!
You know, ’86 was still the Cold War, and the Russians were still the big bad guy. That’s who they were training to fight at Miramar. But the Russians are not the bad guys in Top Gun. You would think that they would be, but the bad guys who they actually kill at the end are just sort of “the enemy.”
MS: They never really say who it is. It’s never against any one people. It’s funny you say that, I did notice that I caught myself laughing, wondering who the bad guys were. They were just bad guys.
CM: Is this is one of the most homosexual movies ever made, or is it just me?
MS: The vibe very much made me think of working at Adventure River back in the day, like how big volleyball was back then. I did catch a lot of that. The volleyball scene, that’s the part where it’s the most out there.
CM: If you start like looking for it, it’s everywhere. Like the pilot in the ready room going, “This guy’s giving me a hard-on!”
MS: For sure. I will say, the love scene with Tom and Kelly McGillis, I totally expected there to be some food or something, because of Hot Shots! They break an egg on the girl’s stomach. Where did that come from?
CM: I think they were making fun of 9 1/2 Weeks there.
MS: Oh yeah. That’s one I’ve seen once or twice. Now that you say that, it makes sense.
CM:Top Gun has a classic Eighties love scene, in that there’s a blue light for some reason, and a saxophone playing in the distance.
MS: Everything’s in silhouette. I totally expected there to be some nudity, but there wasn’t.
CM: This is the age of the erotic thriller! There was nudity everywhere! The way he came on to her in the bar was a little weird.
MS: What do you mean?
CM: He followed her into the bathroom. You couldn’t get away with that today. It’s creepy. I mean, back in my dating days, I’ve known guys who have done that. And now that I think about it, there’s one specific instance when somebody followed the girl that I was trying to get with into the bathroom, and it totally worked. She went home with him instead of me.
MS: I remember a time when some girls followed me into a men’s bathroom. So, you know, it happens.
CM: So, bottom line. Would you recommend people watch Top Gun?
MS: Absolutely, especially if you like movies that engage you with just a fantastic display of moviemaking. I have massive respect for the craft of movie, because I know what it takes to make them and how difficult it is. And people often write off movies just because of the content or something, but Top Gun definitely exceeded my expectations.
This week, 25 years ago, I was a knot of anticipation. The thing I wanted to see more than any other thing, the Batman film, was at last coming out. I’m not saying I wanted to see Batman more than I wanted to see any other movie at the time; I mean I had never been so eager to partake in anything, ever. In retrospect, I haven’t been so excited for the release of any other piece of pop culture. I think the only things to surpass it are real-life greatnesses: kissing a girl, getting married, the birth of my children. Seriously. (Where are you going? Come back!)
I was so excited in part because I loved and devoured the Batman comics. The character appealed to my maturing sense of identity and growing individualism. He was no less human than I was — he wasn’t bitten by a radioactive spider, exposed to cosmic or gamma rays, or orphaned from an alien planet — infinitely relatable to this here shy little nerd. What made Bruce Wayne into Batman was nothing but a common traumatic childhood; granted, my sheltered, suburban upbringing was far from harrowing. But, if you stabbed Batman with a sword-umbrella, he’d bleed like anyone else, and he became successful by dint of willpower alone. Plus, what kid doesn’t want to hear that it’s the monsters who should be afraid of the dark?
Michael Keaton in Batman
The movie Batman hit me square in the face, at age 13, the summer before 8th grade, a seminal moment at a seminal age. It marked my transition from an artless, prepubescent consumer of whatever happened to be in front of me to a relatively thoughtful observer of craft and commercialism. The coming of age was my (forgive me) Bat Mitzvah.
Batman felt like the first movie that was made for me. I pined for news in the build-up to its release — this was, of course, long before the internet, a lonely place of dying that left one starved for information. I watched Entertainment Tonight routinely, hoping for clips or updates; I scoured for showbiz tidbits in the Appeal section of The Commercial Appeal — this was pre-Captain Comics. Entertainment Weekly didn’t exist yet. MTV ran a “Steal the Batmobile” contest; I obsessed over the glimpses of the movie the promos and commercials showed. When the video to Prince’s “Batdance” premiered in advance of the film’s release, I was devastated: It didn’t show any scenes from the movie.
Finally, Batman came out. I saw it at Highland Quartet, the first showing on the first day. It napalmed me. I could not have loved it more. It buried itself in my DNA instantly. I bought the Danny Elfman score on tape and wore it out. To this day, it’s my all-time favorite soundtrack. I waited on tenterhooks for the box office results, finally delivered (at least, in my recollection) in the voice of Chris Connelly on an MTV News segment: Batman had a huge opening weekend. I felt personally vindicated. (As I said, I was a nerd.)
Batman was my first movie review. I wrote it for myself, in a journal kept in a spiral school notebook that has been, sadly, lost to time. After some attic digging, I did unearth the second volume of my journal, running from August 1989 to December 1990. Included within is my first ever movies list, presented here unadulterated:
Top 15 Movies, 6-29-90, 1:41-1:46 a.m.
1. Batman
2. The Hunt for Red October
3. RoboCop 2
4. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
5. Gremlins 2
6. The Jerk
7. RoboCop
8. Die Hard
9. The Terminator
10. Top Gun
11. The Blues Brothers
12. The Running Man
13. Young Guns
14. Blind Date
15. Parenthood
Looking back, there are plenty of things to commend in Tim Burton’s film. His German Expressionistic sensibilities (and Anton Furst production design) perfectly reflect the shadows of the mind cast within by Bruce Wayne’s psychological scars; Michael Keaton is surprisingly good as Batman; Jack Nicholson is terrific as the Joker. Its reputation was only burnished by the disappointments that followed, with the 1990s sequels Batman Returns, Batman Forever, and Batman & Robin.
However, in 2005, with Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan rendered the 1989 Batman irrelevant — astonishingly, but no less substantively. Nolan and Christian Bale made a grown-up adaptation — textually moodier, with characters more realistically beat down by life’s injustices — that thoroughly neutered the Burton/Keaton “original.”
The one thing missing from Nolan’s update was the childhood sense of awe and joy that I see bursting from the 1989 film. It’s not really Batman Begins‘ fault. How could it have possibly contained and inspired all that life-changing ecstasy? After all, I wasn’t there to provide it.
