Movie Review: “American Made” Puts Tom Cruise Back In the Pilot’s Seat (That’s Good)

Tom Cruise’s rough 2017 gets a jump-start with the jittery, entertaining American Made.

This year, Tom Cruise failed to kick off a new Mummy franchise and failed to jump from one building to another. If I had to guess which one the uncannily fit 55-year-old had a better shot at, I would’ve taken the jump.

But third time’s the charm for Cruise.

His latest, the jittery and entertaining American Made, comes from Doug Liman, director of the hilarious, thrilling and masochistic sci-fi flick Edge of Tomorrow (aka Live. Die. Repeat). Apparently, being killed 1,000 times by Liman during that shoot provided Cruise with sufficient ego-death to accept the part of another accidentally heroic schmuck here. For that, we should all be thankful.

With the disjointed editing and attitude of the New Hollywood, Liman’s American Made shows Cruise failing upwards as Barry Seal, a self-starting pilot turned CIA operative turned drug exporter turned… well, if I keep listing the turns, I’ll just ruin the film’s twists. It’s worth keeping in mind though that this is based on a true story. Can you spoil history? Well, when it’s given such vibrant cinematic life, it turns out: yes.

Initially recruited by the CIA in the late 1970s to take photographs from his plane, Seal was eventually re-recruited by the Medellín cartel to help transport their cocaine from Colombia to America during his not-so-secret surveillance operations. His CIA handler (Domhnall Gleeson) cottons on to the con, asking Seal to now start smuggling weapons to some Central American rebels as well. These off-book jobs end up netting him and his family millions; more than they can even launder. One night, his wife, Lucy (Sarah Wright), tells him some cash has spilled out on the lawn. Barry says he’ll rake it up in the morning.

American Made

Pictures about the underside of the American Dream are as old as Citizen Kane (actually, older). Still, there’s no harm in Liman throwing one more hubristic tale into the pile; certainly not when it’s this fun and frantic, shot with grimy vigour by César Charlone (City of God).

Besides, American Made is also the story of Carter and Reagan’s America, and how it both fed the international drug epidemic while trying to fight it, and spun-off geopolitical crises that are still unravelling today. That may seem like too grandiose a scale to evaluate a feature like this, but there’s almost no other way to view it. Intimate character study, it is not.

Neither screenwriter Gary Spinelli nor Cruise imbue their version of Barry Seal with anything more than pure id; he just does, and loves doing it. Cruise, as a result, looks like he’s having more fun than he has in ages, hotdogging (or should that be ‘Top Gunning’) and conniving to keep himself alive, and rich. Getting to the center of Seal’s motivations, however, is not on the menu. I wouldn’t go so far to say it’s unfair to Seal, or flippant when it comes to the many tragedies that unfold. Regardless, American Made is more interested in delivering a good time than an introspective time.

Yet that’s what makes this as close to a continuation of The Wolf of Wall Street as we’ve seen. Barry Seal, like Jordan Belfort, is, in this film, more idea than man. Both of these men are America, and their stories are the story of their country. No matter their era, their movies reveal how the United States got to where it is today: with id running the White House.

4/5

In cinemas Aug 24. Rated MA15+ for strong coarse language.