Tom Cruise was pushing 60 when they shot "Top Gun: Maverick," and to me anyway he looks better with some cragginess to his features than he did 20 years ago. He is less pumped-up and more lean. His face, for so long agelessly youthful, has matured -- he looks manly but without any trace of the infirmaries of old age.

In a sense, this movie is Tom's swan song. The titles say he co-produced the film and played the lead role, but according to people who were there during production, he basically ran the whole show. He negotiated how the flying sequences would be filmed from the cramped interiors of F-18 strike-fighter jets. This meant that he and several of the films characters would be up in those planes, and using a new generation of micro-sized digital movie camera, they would be filmed as if they were doing the flying. At first the Navy resisted, but to Tom, using CGI to present the air battles was a deal-breaker. It's an indicator of Tom Cruise's star power that the Navy came around. A good thing too, because the flying sequences were, to me, the only thing watching in this sequel to Top Gun.

Oh, it was great seeing Tom looking so fit and no longer weirdly youthful, but all grown up into a very handsome, mature man. He plays his cookie-cutter character the only way it can be played, totally straight, and his visual charisma keeps our attention locked onto him in every scene in which he appears.

Like Tom, all the actors are forced into two-dimensional roles in order to go through the motions required by the brain-dead plot. Two stories run in parallel behind the plot: a rekindled love affair between Tom and his female flame, played by Jennifer Connelly; and an inherited hate story, if you will, between Tom and the son (Miles Teller) of Tom's on-board weapons officer whose call sign was Goose, who was killed when their plane crashed. We are expected to believe that among the best of the Navy's elite aviators selected to accompany Tom on a treacherous, top-secret raid, they selected a pilot with a blood-feud against Tom for causing the death of his father. Sometimes Hollywood, in the service of generating some excitement, asks us to suspend our disbelief to the point of absurdity.

And so the formula plods along: Tom is offered the mission and accepts, the pilots to accompany him are auditioned, and they all go up in their planes for training. Eventually comes the Big Mission. I won't describe any more than that, because most people are aware of how the formula goes anyway, and this rendering of an aviation war movie gives us not a single memorable line or plot twist. Compared with this Hollywood disposable thriller, my favorite WWII aviation warfare movie, "!2 O'clock High," is Shakespeare.

Like most action movies, this one allows no more than ten or so minutes of talking or other boring content to separate the exciting sequences the audience paid to see: flying, riding motorcycles without helmets, and fisticuffs.

As I said before, the flying sequences are excellent, setting a new standard for portraying airborne warfare between modern fighter jets. But my favorite flight sequence is toward the end, when Tom takes his female flame up in a gorgeous WWII propellor-driven Mustang fighter. As it turns out, this is Tom's personal plane, and he is an excellent, thoroughly credentialed pilot. (Though not in current fighter jets. He did not fly in the F-18 scenes.) That Mustang was one of the highest-performing fighter planes of WWII, and thus by definition designed for expert pilots only. Is there anything Tom Cruise cannot do?

Since you're asking, I'm not sure he could produce a serious drama for and about adults. From films like Rain Man and Eyes Wide Shut I know he is a competent actor. But more important to Tom than creds as an actor is his status as the reigning Hollywood male star, a credential he has clung to over decades by carefully selecting his roles and cultivating a persona that reminds every member of the audience that the character they are seeing on-screen in any given movie is a lightly modified version of Tom Cruise. Like William Holden, Hollywood's 1950s golden boy, Tom and his movies will recede from the public's consciousness soon after he retires.

And so, as I said earlier, "Top Gun: Maverick" could be described as Tom's swan song, though no doubt he has many movies left in him to make in the upcoming decade or two. Tom had to convince a lot of people to put up the financing for this film, to be willing to pay a huge premium to satisfy his demand for realistic dog-fighting sequences, and in some cases, even to appear in the film. It was Tom's intention to give Val Kilmer a role despite his voice not functioning due to throat cancer. A lesser producer would have considered Val's inclusion to be an expensive distraction, but Tom Cruise knew the importance of Val's character in the original movie, and that he audience would want him in the remake. In addition, though I haven't been told so, I'm pretty sure Tom wanted to give Val a part he could play despite his disability.

Another way this will be Cruise's signature film is that it is the first of his starring productions to pass the billion-dollar gross earnings mark. This is especially impressive because to protest the presence of a Taiwan patch on Tom's flying jacket, China refused to air the film and thus the film lost hundreds of millions of viewers. (Tom and the producers agreed, they were not going to remove that reference to Taiwan, no matter what.) But in the end, what Tom accomplished here may have been successful by Hollywood standards, but as a movie it is, like most of Tom's other features, devoid of staying power in the annals of quality film-making. As much as the profits, mediocrity in the service of profit is another aspect of Tom's legacy that cannot be denied.

Still, for a film to make this much money is impossible to fake: a huge worldwide audience needs to be enthusiastic and put their money down to see the film in an actual movie theater. To satisfy international audiences, the plot must be kept simple and the dialogue at grade-school level so even when translated into subtitles, nobody will lose track of what is going on. And since the plot is so formulaic, and the relationships between the characters are so transparent, so devoid of the subtleties of human interaction, the film's worldwide audience have no problem figuring out the story and the two subplots, nor will they give a damn about any of them, because what they mainly want is Tom in a jet fighter, shooting down enemies of the U. S. A. (The bad guys represented in this production are modeled after North Korean military personnel.) Better than he's ever done before, and that's saying something, Tom Cruise gave this huge audience the mindless entertainment it wanted and the result was massive profits for the studio and for Tom personally, as well as an enjoyable viewing experience for millions of people. Tom Cruise is at the very top of his game, and the production was carried out at an exemplary level of professionalism. Had Tom Cruise not gone into the movie business, there is little doubt he would be a big player in whatever industry or profession he took on.

I, however, was not among those who gladly forked over $20 to see this film in a theater. By accident I discovered Amazon Prime were screening the movie at no charge. I had no intention of going to see the film, but for free, viewed at home on my 4K 65" Sony TV running on a high-speed fiber optic internet connection, I thought what the hell and parked myself for a couple of hours. The superior production quality of the film came across fine. But everything else about the film was to me so predictable and devoid of interesting characters or subtleties of personality, I would have enjoyed "Top Gun: Maverick" a lot more if during playback I turned off the movie's sound and fired up my sound system to the max and played "Van Halen Rising" as I skipped from one action scene to the next.