I went to the theater with high hopes. I love planes and military hardware in general and thought I'd at least get a rousing patriotic charge from this movie. But in fact patriotism is pretty far from its mind.

Instead, we're offered the thinnest of cardboard characters involved in various strained relations with one another, and we're presumably supposed to care about them. But not a single character felt real.

There's the guy who's always smirking and bragging about being "the best." (The actor, Glen Powell, told an interviewer that he'd realized, with understandable uneasiness, that he was playing "the biggest dick on the planet"; but in fact his entire character consists of no more than his pasted-on, clichéd smirk. He's like some boastful rival in a children's book, and you know he's going to be taken down a peg.) There's the Miles Teller character, who holds a manufactured grudge against Cruise. There's a nerdy guy -- with glasses, no less! -- on a fighter pilot! -- and a handful of obligatory minorities, and a woman pilot who's given a couple of mild wisecracks. (Note: We're told that all these people are "the best of the best.") There's Jennifer Connelly, who's conveniently available but who doesn't want to be "hurt" again. (The love scenes were SO treacly and boring that I felt like a little kid, tempted to duck out to the candy counter.) Throughout the film, various stiff-necked officers berate Cruise for being such a rebel, for not following the rules, blah blah blah. These contrived conflicts were so fakey and formulaic that I found myself, at times, looking away from the screen in embarrassment at the things actors like Jon Hamm were forced to say. In truth, all the assorted subplots are silly and predictable, and you know they'll be resolved by the end.

Outside of the flying scenes, the film moves with surprising lethargy, in a sticky, sentimental, weirdly reverent way -- reverent, that is, toward the earlier "Top Gun" -- with huge screen-filling close-ups of Cruise and the other cast members, all of them speaking very slowly, with lengthy silences between their sentences. You have to wait an awfully long time for the big-deal bombing mission. When it finally comes, it just seems like comic-book stuff, with a lot constipated grunting and heavy breathing on the sound track in an effort to generate suspense. As I watched, I kept comparing the movie with "Zero Dark Thirty" and "The Right Stuff," both infinitely better.

One final complaint that will resonate with no one but the most pedantic of English majors: There's a missing comma in the opening text on the screen. (It belongs after "1969.") This is an increasingly common mistake, especially here on the net, but it's annoying that a Hollywood blockbuster wouldn't even find room, in its gigantic budget, for a decent copy editor.