And even now, with a terminal diagnosis, he’s trying to help and guide Maverick. He understands the system he understands responsibility in a much wider-ranging way than does his friend. Here’s a stick jockey in his late 50s or early 60s who has grown up in a very different way from his little brother. It’s all looks and body language, and we buy it all. Typing his communications to be read on a computer screen, Kilmer can act only physically for most of the scene. The writing by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and longtime Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie the unobtrusive direction by Joseph Kosinski and most of all the settled, lived-in performances by Kilmer and Cruise sell us on that sea change. These two rivals from the first film have believably become the very best of friends, even brothers. We see a relationship informed by years of blanks we can fill in ourselves: Iceman maturing past his brash youth and becoming the leader he was born to be Maverick stumbling along his own flashier, heroic and less establishment-oriented path. After much setup, viewers are finally treated to one scene (and only one) reuniting the two in the flesh.īut when Maverick and Iceman finally get together onscreen again, that’s where we see something really alive. It also finds Mav and Ice 35 years into what has turned out to be a very deep and brotherly friendship, with now-Adm. “Maverick,” set about 35 years later, finds Cruise’s character largely the same - still disobeying orders, still buzzing towers - if calmed and weathered a bit, and struggling with his failure as a surrogate father to his late best friend’s son. By the end of that film, the two had been bonded by combat, relying on each other to survive. In the 1986 original, Iceman was Maverick’s competition for the top spot in the Top Gun rankings - both were equally brash and testosterone-fueled young fighter pilots, but Iceman read from the standard playbook and Maverick, to put it kindly, had problems with authority. The combination lays fertile ground for a great, often unheralded performer to shine, if only for a moment. Val Kilmer’s lone scene in “Top Gun: Maverick” is strikingly powerful - not only because it successfully projects decades of close friendship between his character, Tom “Iceman” Kazansky, and Tom Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, but because it also draws on the actor’s own experiences. Warning: Radar shows “Top Gun: Maverick” spoilers ahead.
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