Tom goes from Top Gun hero to double-crossing drug smuggler
FIRST the good news: American Made is a cracking story, based on real events in one of the CIA’s madder periods, starring Tom Cruise and a lot of planes.
You won’t be bored, but you might leave with a faint sense of unease, because while Cruise can express conflict and conscience perfectly well, for some bizarre reason the writer Gary Spinelli and director Doug Liman never ask him to.
From start to finish he is boyish, cheerful (faintly worried sometimes when possibly about to die) and altogether an allAmerican hero.
This sits oddly, because he is playing Barry Seal, a young TWA pilot recruited in 1978 by the CIA, given a twin-engined plane and a fake ID and told to photograph communist airstrips in Central America. ‘South of the border, north of the Equator, enemies of Democracy,’ says his pale-eyed, increasingly delusional boss Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson).
He flies — in glorious, oversaturated postcard colour — over the jungles of Nicaragua, Colombia, Honduras and El Salvador. Terrifying aerial sequences are brilliant, though pleasure is dampened by remembering that it was this filming which in 2015 saw two deaths.
Soon he gets new paymasters by smuggling for the drug lords, played with relish by Alejandro Edda and others.
It escalates, alarming his wife (Sarah Wright) who is woken at 4am, heavily pregnant, and told to pack up the house and children because they are moving to Arkansas for an even more complicated CIA plan to send guns to the Contras to fight Nicaragua’s Left-wing Sandinistas.
But a lot of the guns end up in Colombia because of Seal’s private enterprise, and Contra fighters brought over for training simply abscond.
It is absorbing enough, and there is comedy in the domestic world of banknotes spilling out of cupboards and buried in the garden and barn, while AK47s and bales of cocaine pile up.
There is an unexpected death, and as Seal’s enterprises fall apart, the CIA disowns him — then uses him again until his cover is finally blown with the bad hombres thanks to Reagan’s ‘war on drugs’.
Although there is real sadness in the end of his story, do we feel it? Does Cruise show real emotion or self-doubt behind that cheery boyish smile? No.
And does Seal the devoted daddy have qualms about flooding America with drugs to ruin other people’s kids? No.
There is something creepy about it — but the flying is ace.