Quentin Tarantino offers rave review of ‘Top Gun: Maverick’: ‘F—ING TERRIFIC!’

Pulp Fiction director hails Tom Cruise blockbuster

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With Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick officially the biggest movie of the summer, writer-director Quentin Tarantino has officially given the high-flying sequel top marks in a rare review.

Tarantino shared his thoughts on Cruise’s highest-grossing film ever ($1.29 billion and counting) while appearing on the ReelBlend podcast this week alongside his Pulp Fiction co-writer, Roger Avary.

The Oscar winner said that he normally doesn’t like to speak about films currently playing in theatres because he feels pressured to say “good things.”

Otherwise, “I’m ‘slamming’ someone, I don’t want to do that.”

But Tarantino broke his rule because he “f–ing” loved Maverick. “I thought it was fantastic. I saw it at the theatres … That and [Steven] Spielberg’s West Side Story both provided a true cinematic spectacle, the kind that I’d almost thought that I wasn’t going to see anymore. It was fantastic.”

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Tarantino added that he was a huge fan of [original Top Gun director] Tony Scott, who died in 2012.

“I love Tony so much that that’s as close as we’re ever going to get to seeing one more Tony Scott movie,” he said. “[Director Joseph Kosinski] did a great job. The respect and the love of Tony was in every frame. It was almost in every decision. It was consciously right there, but in this really cool way that was really respectful. And I think it was in every decision Tom made on the film. It’s the closest we’re ever going get to seeing one more Tony Scott movie, and it was a f—ing terrific one.”

Elsewhere in his chat, Tarantino opened up on a conversation he had with Cruise about trying to follow-up the ’80s action classic.

“I did ask him, ‘How do you do a Top Gun movie without Tony Scott?’ And he goes, ‘You’re right … [but] we figured out a way. We came up with a good story.”