Still got it. Or at least had it there for a fleeting few hours on a Sunday afternoon. How else to explain the spectacular appeal of a sequel that hit the screen some 36 years after the original, and with a leading man who’s fast approaching his 60th birthday?

Indeed, what is it that makes us temporarily suspend our loathing for Hollywood and head to the theater for the first time in ages? Is it patriotism? Is it a desperate yearning for one’s country to throw off this madness and recapture what it once was? Is it both?

There’s something quintessentially American about “Top Gun II: Maverick” — something unapologetically in-your-face and jingoistic and predictable and awesome. Something that couldn’t possibly have been dreamt up in any other country but ours. This is a movie that mid-level Chinese communist apparatchiks would love to take in, but which their thin-skinned overlords have forbidden from being shown because, just this once, Hollywood didn’t kowtow to their editorial demands.

That’s their loss, not ours. In its first glorious weekend, TG2 zoomed to a $300 million worldwide box-office take and three-fourths of the way to profitability — no small feat given the budget. And it did so while flipping a middle finger to the Middle Kingdom, with those two offending flags — one Japanese and one Taiwanese — still firmly stitched onto Maverick’s flight jacket. Good for Hollywood, which has, at least temporarily, retaken the high ground rather than sucking up to China’s censors. As columnist Sonny Bunch writes:

The resounding success of “Top Gun: Maverick” could represent a tipping point in Hollywood’s relationship to China. The cinematic celebration of U.S. military superiority has been a monster success, even though it wasn’t released in the Middle Kingdom. It’s about time American studios recalibrated their priorities to be less reliant on Chinese censors and Chinese moviegoers.

This isn’t to say that TG2 didn’t bow to political correctness. It did. Top Gun’s graduates are bend-over-backward diverse, and when Maverick selects his strike force for the film’s suicide mission — the bombing of a nuclear facility housed within a steep canyon and guarded by “fifth-generation” fighters from an unnamed enemy air force — he checks all the big identity boxes: the black one, the Hispanic one, even the female one.

But make no mistake: Tom Cruise is still the guy. He’s flying a nimbler F/A-18 Super Hornet this time, although the old F-14 Tomcat makes an unlikely cameo. And his box-office appeal is every bit what it was nearly four decades ago, even if his dark hair and wrinkle-free visage seem rather, oh, improbable.

But beyond the obvious appeal of another Tom Cruise white-knuckler, the movie may well serve a far more important purpose: military recruiting. As the editors of The Wall Street Journal write: “Let’s better hope this paean to fighter aviation captures the imagination of younger Americans. For years the Navy and the Air Force have been short of fighter pilots. The picture is worse for enlisted service members such as experienced maintenance personnel. Only about a quarter of America’s youth meet current eligibility standards to enlist, and fewer still are interested.”

Yes, TG2 is a recruiting tool — and we need it desperately. When the Biden military goes all in on wokeness, to the great detriment of readiness and warfighting, we’re on dangerous ground. When the American military declares its primary mission to be the rooting out of “white supremacy,” we’ve clearly lost our way. When the Marine Corps of Belleau Wood and Tarawa and Khe Sanh and Fallujah defiles itself with rainbow-colored “Pride” bullets, we can no longer recognize ourselves. And young men wonder whether military service is as noble and ennobling as it once was.

Judging by its box-office success, “Top Gun: Maverick” has still got it. The question is: Do we?