Top Gun review – now impossible to view Tom Cruise’s testosterone-swamped film without affection (opens in new tab)

This gave a young Cruise entry into the A-list, as the brilliant, courageous rule-breaking pilot, frenemy of Val Kilmer and in love with Kelly McGillis‘This gives me a hard-on”; “Don’t tease me”; “I want some BUTTS!” The comedy takes on sexual identity in Top Gun have become so widespread after Quentin Tarantino’s monologue on the subject that it would be revisionist now to claim that this film was 100% heterosexual. But maybe the joke arose from cinephiles’ civilian naivety about what milita...