American Made tells the story of Barry Seal (Tom Cruise), a TWA pilot who is recruited by the CIA to fly reconnaissance missions over Communist strongholds in Central America. He does such a good job and has such a good reputation that a Colombian drug cartel recruits him to fly drugs into the United States. When he’s caught by the Colombian government and held in prison, the CIA keeps him from being prosecuted by recruiting him to fly weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua.
If none of that makes any sense, it should give you an idea of how insane things were during the “War on Drugs” and the Reagan-era. There were so many double deals and money laundering schemes that it’s hard to believe that anyone was actually able to keep track of who was actually doing what to whom. Thankfully, American Made is able to guide the viewer through what’s happening with a minimum of confusion.
Before watching this film, I had never heard of Barry Seal. Admittedly, I didn’t have a lot of interest in the politics and clandestine operations going on in Central America in the mid-1980s. That said, I am also aware that if one was going to research such things, this movie wouldn’t be the place to start as its been highly fictionalized.
Tom Cruise plays Seal as a laid-back, overconfident character who makes so much money at his various endeavors that he doesn’t know where to keep it all. Cruise’s performance is one of his best in recent years. (His body language reminded me of Kyle Chandler’s mannerisms in the Netflix series, Bloodline. That may not be the best description but it’s the first thing that popped into my head while watching the movie.)
Director Doug Limon keeps things slick and glossy from beginning to end. One criticism that I have, though, is that for a movie depicting drug trafficking and gun running, there’s no real grit to it. All we see is an enormous amount of money changing hands but never any of the consequences from the characters’ actions. Aside from a brief news video montage, we don’t see any impact to humanity at all.
The supporting cast, headlined by Domhnall Gleeson as Seal’s CIA contact and Sarah Wright as Seal’s wife, is solid overall but no one is given a lot to do when compared with Cruise’s globe-trotting smuggling adventures. Caleb Landry Jones stands out as Seal’s troublesome brother-in-law.
Christophe Beck’s score is excellent and the soundtrack is liberally peppered with 1970s country-rock classics from the likes of Charlie Rich, Linda Ronstadt, and the Bellamy Brothers.
American Made is a well-made, well-acted, and well-directed film but it falls into the predictable “rise-and-fall” theme and there’s nothing about it that makes it stand above others of its type. However, I do recommend it for Tom Cruise’s performance alone.
3.5 out of 5.0 stars
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