Tom Cruise (Universal Pictures)
Director Doug Liman has made some of Tom Cruise’s better recent films, but couldn’t somebody have come up with more memorable titles for them? The 2014 sci-fi thriller Edge of Tomorrow was more inventive than its generic name, and this week American Made, which does sound like the quintessential Tom Cruise title, has the faint ironic ring of sweatshop bluejeans. But it’s a better movie than it sounds, and that title rubs a cynical underbelly.
Set in the late ’70s, the movie follows the true story of Barry Seal (Cruise), a TWA pilot who likes to jostle passengers out of their slumber by improvising a little “turblulence” in the air.
Sure, this looks like just another Cruise-as-douchey-hot-shot movie, but Liman quickly pulls aside the glamorous curtain of the airline pilot to reveal a rote tedium. Back home, we see Barry’s wife Lucy (Sarah Wright) slip into something more comfortable to welcome her uniformed flyboy back from the air, but he just passes out from exhaustion.
Still, he has a family to feed. When CIA agent Schafer (Domhnall Gleason) recruits him to fly reconnaissance missions in Central America, he answers his country’s call. Seal performs this service well, but when Uncle Sam refuses to give him a raise, the flying gringo is soon tempted by overtures from Central American businessmen, including a guy named Pablo Escobar (Mauricio Mejía) who wants him to run cocaine between Colombia and the States.
Unlike his recent turn in the pretty much completely unnecessary The Mummy, Cruise actually acts, evoking past roles but letting his character show his scruffy side in VHS footage that frames the movie with frantic recollections of an adventure that may have seemed like a good idea at the time but went inevitably fubar.
An action star with a crazy streak, Cruise is perfect for the role, his very career an apt metaphor for American arrogance and entitlement. The title American Made isn’t something to be proud of, but something that is cobbled together and miraculously works—until it doesn’t Cruise and Gleason for the most part sell all the shenanigans, though the MVP award goes to Caleb Landry Jones as Lucy’s trashy brother JB.
As wild as the ride gets, the movie is perhaps not crazy enough, but it gets where its going with the help of a cheesy but bitter music cue: as Seal’s drug-running scheme grows into a multi-person operation, the 1981 hit “Hooked on Classics” by Stars on 45 scores a frantic montage of late-night jets stuffed with cocaine; it’s the commercial corruption of once lofty ideals. American Made may not be first-tier action, but it more than makes up for The Mummy.
AMERICAN MADE
Directed by Doug Liman
Written by Gary Spinelli
With Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson, Sarah Wright
Rated R. Contains strong language, drug use, sexual situations, and violence.
115 minutes.
Opens today at area theaters.
