American Made ★★★½
TOM Cruise expunges the memory of The Mummy with a captivating performance in the highly entertaining American Made.
It’s based on true events; one of those stranger than fiction stories where a character seeking to have more in their life, maybe searching for a quick fortune or just a change from the mundane, bites off way more than they can chew.
Usually the spiral stems from a flaw in their character that makes them vulnerable to manipulation.
One of the best recent examples is Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street but there are many others – The Informant with Matt Damon and The Infiltrator with Bryan Cranston, to name just two others.
This time it’s Cruise’s moment to shine and he had a pretty good job of it. It’s not his best work (that’s Born On The Fourth of July, Eyes Wide Shut and Magnolia) but its his best in a fair while and he’s far more comfortable than being the self-centred plunderer of ancient antiquities come accidental hero in The Mummy.
He is also in the hands of a very competent director in Doug Liman using a script based on engrossing true events that, at times, defy belief.
While Liman has been making films for 20 years, this is only writer Gary Spinelli’s second effort. Director and writer combine to also do a great job of boiling down the geo-political exposition into a series of bite-sized, easily digestible chunks of simple dialogue and video animation.
It’s a period piece covering the years from 1978 to 1985. Cruise plays Barry Seal, a commercial pilot for TWA who is bored with doing the standard domestic runs. He has a wife, Lucy, and two young children and needs excitement and money.
During a stop-over he is approached in a hotel bar by a CIA agent, Monty Schafer, who offers him a job working for himself flying down to Central America to take surveillance photos of rebel training camps.
The sheer danger and illegal nature of the work seems to completely escape the starstruck Barry who is more interested in getting a flash new fast place and, more importantly, his freedom.
Of course Barry produces the best surveillance photos the CIA have ever seen but when he starts asking Schafer for more money, he is not forthcoming telling him he is doing it “for his country”.
So, when Barry is shot at, forced to land and ordered by a group of Colombian drug dealers to do drop-ofs for them in Florida on his return trips, he agrees for the substantial payments involved.
Things get more complicated for Barry. The CIA decide they want him to also run guns to the rebels and more often so he needs more planes and pilots, surrounding himself with a motley group of adventurers.
Meanwhile the drug business is becoming even more lucrative to the extent Barry now has cash coming out of his ears. At the same time he has to deal with a fiesty wife whom he has been lying to for a fair chunk of the film.
Of course it all descends into personal tragedies and political farce as we know from the true-life events of the CIA’s covert attempts to firstly arm the Sandanista rebels against the Nicaraguan government and, when that failed, expose a drug-running operation that the CIA was actually funding and supporting.
Additional to Cruise, there are good performances from Domhall Gleeson as Schafer, Sarah Wright as Lucy and Caleb Landry Jones in the pivotal part of Lucy’s redneck brother Bubba.
One failing of the film is its exploration of the character motivations. For example, why does Barry do what he does wso unquestioningly? Is it because he doesn’t care, his e.g. is so out of control or because he’s more than a little stupid? We never find out.
It’s hard to tell whether this is the fault of the script, the direction of the film in that it focuses more on the events in each moment or because Barry never really revealed himself to anyone.
Doug Liman started his career with a bang in 1996 with the indie-comedy Swingers followed by Go in 1999. Both films are highly regarded as minor cult classics. He has predominantly focused on actions films since, the best being Edge of Tomorrow (2014), also with Cruise, and The Bourne Identity from 2002.
American Made is his most rounded and diverse film to date. He brings just the right amount of docu-drama camera and editing style to ensure the film remains visually appealing while depicting the chaos of proceedings.