AJ O'Leary

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Top Gun 2 Is Gonna Have A Pitbull Version of “Take My Breath Away” In It and You Know It

Please understand the consequences of your demands for a new Top Gun movie

You’ve probably heard the news of a Top Gun sequel by now. If you’re like most of my fellow Americans (or someone who admires typical American cinema) and you’re happy about it, good for you. I don’t share in the love for the first Top Gun but recognize that, for better or for worse, nothing embodies the post-Vietnam American identity better than square-jawed dudes being dudes and flying fighter jets for two hours.

That’s all well and good. I just hope you know the consequences of your support for such things, and those consequences include an inevitable Pitbull remix of Take My Breath Away.

It wouldn’t be Pitbull’s first song invoking everyone’s favorite problematic couch-disrespecter. Take Get It Started, a song that sounds as if it could’ve been created to support a Mission Impossible movie with lyrics like this:

Big news, Pitbull, Tom Cruise, Mumbai / I lit up their December night like the Fourth of July, Vanilla Sky / Thriller in Manila, knockin’ em out like Pacquiao / No Ali, no Frazier / But for now, it’s off to Malaysia / Two passports, three cities, two countries, one day / Now that’s worldwide. If you think it’s a game, let’s play. DALE!

Redoing Take My Breath Away for no reason other than to fill a soundtrack for a Top Gun sequel makes perfect sense. One guy is a globetrotting, shades-donning dude; the other is a globetrotting, shades-donning dude who is bald and not a Scientologist. Take My Breath Away is an 80s classic, and there is nothing Pitbull loves more than using 80s standards as springboards for shouting “DALE!” a lot. Throw in the fact that absolutely nobody anywhere is crying out for a remade Take My Breath Away without Berlin’s involvement, and the inevitability of such a thing is all but assured.

I’ve even gone to the trouble of drafting some lyrics for this hypothetical song to soften the impact for you when this event does indeed come to pass:

I used to be poor, now I’m in Singapore / Top Gun, hah, we put the pedal to the floor / I take a dollar and a dollar and a dollar and a dollar ’til I’m a billionaire / Relax, baby, try not to stare / ‘Coz every night and every day / You take my breath away / DALE!

An entire generation of Zoomers will only know of this version. It’ll be what they floss to after their Gen Xer parents drag them along to the theater to relive the glory of the first bang-bang-shooty film their parents dragged them along to once upon a time. Much like America’s inability to move beyond the good feelings of winning World War II to this day, it will be a feedback loop celebrating a crappy, larger-than-life memory and pale imitation of the real thing.

A Pitbull remake of Take My Breath Away is exactly what American moviegoers eager for studios to do things just because they can, without considering whether they should, deserve in 2019. People from my generation thought 99 Red Balloons was a Goldfinger song. This is not going to be the year time stops moving in a circle. This is the bed we’re making, the one we’ve been making for generations, and the one we’re going to sleep in from here to eternity. Let’s just hope the movie itself doesn’t make us want someone else to take all our breaths away, permanently.

I’ll see you back here in five years when it’s time for Selena Gomez to redo You’ve Got a Friend in Me.

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