I'm late to the party. I know. But with all the praise Top Gun: Maverick got, we thought this would be a great popcorn flick to satiate our January-first couch potato needs.

Were we ever mistaken! I don't know what type of reality distortion field the reviewers of this movie currently reside in, but I'm not even sure we watched the same film.

The good: every single aerial scene had us on the edge of our seat. Amazing cinematography, flight choreography, and it felt like we were there. No idea how they pulled this off - we were blown away.

The bad: literally everything else. Director Kosinski is back, continuing his trend of not caring about humans in this clinically directed nightmare. Every character comes across as a stand-in, which leave you looking for superlatives for the word "cliche". (Cliche-est?) the dialogue is borderline parody, with my partner and I taking turns predicting the next line with shocking accuracy. Then, the plot is complete nonsense for a variety of reasons:

1. Really cool that Top Gun graduates are "elite", but... why not hire pilots with, you know, real world experience... like OLDER Top Gun graduates?! This is a serious plot hole that gets dumber the more you think about it. "Let's hire talented rookies to fly this key mission!" - why?!

2. Three weeks. That's how long the writers continuously emphasize these rookies have to train. Which, on its face, is already absolutely ridiculous - but then, the training gets SHORTENED - meaning that the hour of sequences you just watched, happened in... just a couple days? The timeline makes ZERO sense here.

3. Maybe, if you want us to care about our characters, you can help us understand the stakes? Pretty basic stuff. This movie is only a 2-hour first act, followed by the finale, where the team fight literally faceless baddies in the mountains somewhere. The rest of the stakes are petty, borderline-ridiculous interpersonal conflicts.

Everything coalesces into an ooze of bad, with a script seemingly written by a 12-year-old, acting so cringe it'll make you lose hair (stop TRYING so hard, Jennifer Connolly), and a soundtrack so gratingly sentimental it made us want to mute our speakers. The original Top Gun was a dumb mess, and I'm glad to see the sequel outdoing it in stupidity.