Top gun runner in Cruise control
Do a Google image search for Barry Seal, the drug smuggler and CIA gun-runner, and you’ll see a portly bruiser of a man with receding hair. A lifelong friend of hot dogs with extra mustard.
Welcome to American Made, Seal’s biopic, in which he’s played by – wait for it – Tom Cruise. He may be a fraction jowlier these days, but the transformations he bothers with, role to role, are marginal.
What this film is selling, though, and what sort of lets it off the hook, is nostalgia for the vehicle that made Cruise a star. When he’s zooming around South America in a hi-spec jet, you can practically hear them highfiving at the pitch meeting. “It’s Top Gun, except he’s a maverick informant!” Seal’s lawless career path began as a bored TWA pilot in 1978, approached by CIA handler Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson, all greasy persuasion) to conduct recon across the Caribbean.
Before long, with his gorgeous blonde trophy wife Lucy (Sarah Wright, below) and family to support and no sign of a raise, Colombia’s notorious Medellín cartel talks him into a lucrative deal. On his way back from those CIA missions, he’ll load up his plane with hundreds of kilos of unsold cocaine, and dump it into swamps, Stateside.
That’s before Schafer has him delivering requisitioned AK-47S to the Cia-backed militias in Nicaragua. At every unlikely turn, we get a “S--- gets crazy from here!” – in fact, that’s a literal quote, from Cruise’s Seal narrating his story to a camcorder in 1986. As structuring devices go, it’s seriously flimsy but the film needed some alibi for wanting to tell it at all. Because it doesn’t end well. Seal gets complacent. We know this can only lead to the roof caving in, Goodfellas-style.