Movie Review: 'American Made'

American Made stars Tom Cruise as Barry Seal, a real life character who was at the center of the drug, guns, and South American contras controversies of the late 70s and 80s. Barry was just an airline pilot for TWA until the CIA caught wind of his trafficking in Cuban cigars. Sensing that Barry has just the kind of moral flexibility that the CIA needs, Agent Shaffer (Domnhall Gleeson) recruits him to run reconnaissance missions in South America, spying on supposed communist outposts.

Barry graduates to the drug trade when he is kidnapped by the Medellin cartel during a stopover in Columbia. They’ve caught on to Barry’s kamikaze missions and figure he’s the man who can help them get their product into America. Barry is eager to agree and becomes the first American welcomed into Pablo Escobar’s inner circle. Meanwhile, the CIA willingly looks the other way on Barry’s drug trade as long he’s willing to fly illegal guns to the Contras in Guatemala for their supposed fight against the Sandinistas.

This is all pretty crazy stuff and, as directed by Doug Liman, the absurdity starts almost from the beginning and never seems to let up. Barry Seal has no business being at the center of the biggest intelligence and drug controversies in American history and yet here he is, thrust onto the stage with only a giant grin and his moral flexibility to keep him from being killed. Indeed, nothing seems to phase Barry, whether it’s the potential of being shot out of the sky, being shot on the ground, getting arrested, or trying to find places to stuff the millions of dollars in cash his new lifestyle has awarded him with.

Much of the story of American Made has the bizarre atmosphere of my favorite American history podcast, The Dollop, with comedians Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds. As I watched the film I could not help but imagine the extraordinary comic spin Dave and Gareth would put on this story. One scene in particular has the perfect level of insanity that The Dollop lives for. In this scene Barry is attempting to avoid military planes that have been sent to guide him to a military base to arrest him.

Barry’s plane is filled with guns, drugs, and money, and he knows he’s in a lot of trouble if he gets caught, so in a brilliantly ballsy move he crashes the plane while trying to land it on a suburban street. He emerges from the plane covered in cocaine and carrying a sack full of money. He then pays a kid for the damage to his yard and buys the kids’ bike, which he uses to make a timely escape while the military plane is still trying to figure out how to get to him.

It's a very funny and utterly absurd scene and I could only imagine the fun that Dave and Gareth might have with something this insane yet true. I do wish that American Made had embraced more of the absurdity of Barry Seal’s life. He really was the Forrest Gump of international crime for a time, that rare person who went from delivering Harley Davidson motorcycles to Pablo Escobar one day to meeting with Colonel Oliver North inside Reagan’s White House the next.

The film could have used a greater sense of just how insane this is. The trailer for American Made captures the absurdity better than the movie does, with Cruise warning the audience after we’ve seen some seriously crazy cuts from Barry’s greatest hits, that things get crazier from here. The film only brushes up against recognizing how crazy everything is. Director Liman prefers keeping his approach rather straightforward, with the humor coming only out of the discomforting, terrifying, and revolting reality of Barry Seal’s life.

That’s a reasonable approach but I can’t help but imagine that a David O. Russell might have found an even darker and funnier approach to this material. The conventional approach adopted by Doug Liman works well enough but I wanted to laugh more and I wanted a stronger condemnation of everyone who was involved in elevating someone as unqualified and corrupt as Barry Seal to such a place in American history.

Barry Seal did not belong where he was. He deserved his fate but he should never have been there to begin with. It’s the kind of governmental corruption that we can only shake our head at after the fact. The reality of Barry Seal is a pretty great story, but I think another creative team might have plumbed the depths of Barry Seal to find something that could be both entertaining and informative — something that could have commented on American history and drawn a few parallels to our day and age.

But, of course, that’s me reviewing the movie that American Made is not. As it is, American Made is solid, well-acted, and conventional but with a strong sense of the absurd. The film is funny and entertaining and Tom Cruise is back to be his wildly charismatic self after stumbling over the awfulness of The Mummy. It’s good to see him back, even if I do long for American Made to be something a little more.