The rave reviews of the new Top Gun sequel are puzzling. I didn’t hate it and I didn’t love it either It has about 15 minutes of exciting flight scenes sandwich between a boiler plate script. You can practically say the lines that the actor is about to speak. All of the characters are people you have seen a hundred times before.

The plot is anorexic thin and it focuses on the wrong characters. The old movie characters are connected to the present movie quite nicely. So far so good, but then it introduces Penny (Jennifer Connolly), who is not in the original movie and whose main purpose seems to be to show that Maverick (Tom Cruise) likes the ladies. She does gives Maverick (Tom Cruise) an encouraging pep talk but that could have been given by any number of other characters. I think it would have made Maverick a bit more compelling too. He would have been a man without any life but the navy.

Then an awful lot of screen time is consumed by the dying Ice Man (Val Kilmer). He is now an admiral and, because he is Maverick’s protector with the bigwigs, he has to die. The bigwigs then can dispense the troublesome rebel Maverick. But it takes forever. We get hints near the beginning of the movie, then we hear Ice Man’s wife talking about his imminent demise, and then we see the Ice Man is in obvious bad health, followed by a whispered conversation where Maverick learns Ice Man is dead, and ending with a completely gratuitous funeral with fighter jets, 21 gun salute, people clutching one another. I guess it was then, and only then that I knew Ice Man was indeed dead.

This misdirection of focus leaves little time for all the young pilots who are actually vying to fly this suicide mission. They are never given enough time to rise above being a stock characters in a war movie. So this story about an intense competition between the best pilots in the navy is drained of any drama because we don’t know enough about the individual characters to care about who gets selected or not. All I wanted was for them to get those bodies into the plane and let us see some explosions.

The action sequences are exciting. While I have complained about the plot, it isn’t bad, just predictable and misdirected. Acting is fine but then it isn’t Olivier doing Hamlet either. Perhaps I was tainted by all those rave reviews which I admit happens from time to time. People were so enthusiastic about the movie that I was expecting more. If you manage your expectations, you will have a fine time.