The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Rich with story
‘American Made’ an entertaining tale of spying, smuggling and trying to stay alive
“I do tend to leap before I look,” Barry says in “American Made,” and we — if not he — are bet- ter for it. Director Doug Liman (“The Bourne Identity,” “Mr.
It becomes a real issue when there’s nowhere else to hide the money. ¶ By, say, the middle of the terrifically entertaining comedy-drama “American Made,” Barry Seal (Tom Cruise) has stacks of cash in bank vaults, shoe boxes, piled high in a shed and even buried in his backyard. His business — working off the books for his country while also getting paid handsomely for the illegal transportation of drugs, guns and even people in and out of the country for criminal empires and insurgent groups — is good.¶It’s so good, of course, that even if we don’t know Seal’s history — “American Made” is based on real events — we know it can’t possibly end well. We know that the difficulties in stashing fat stacks of cash won’t be his only problem, but taking this wild ride with him is so fun that we don’t care. and Mr. Smith”) reunites with the star of his excellent 2014 science-fiction drama “Edge of Tomorrow,” and the pair don’t miss a beat. While feeling nothing like that film, “American Made” is of the same high quality, a well-crafted and largely engrossing work of mainstream cinema.
This is not the first time Seal is being introduced to audiences; he has been played by a few actors — Michael Pare portrays him briefly in 2016’s fairly compelling “The Infiltrator” — but never by someone as high-profile as Cruise and in a big Hollywood film dedicated to his story.
As that story is told in “American Made,” Barry is a pilot for TWA in the late 1970s who likes to live a little dangerously. One one flight, he switches off autopilot and invents a bout with turbulence to mess with a cabin full of passengers, and he makes a little money smuggling Cuban cigars. That side job brings him to the attention of Mony Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson), a CIA operative who wants to give him a business — Independent Aviation Consultants, or, ahem, IAC — and a small, fast plane so he can fly covert missions for Uncle Sam.
Not long after, Barry is walking off a TWA plane during a preflight check that, like being an airline pilot in general, has never seemed quite so boring. Next, he is darting over dangerous terrain, grabbing aerial photos of insurgents in South America that thrill Shafer and his superiors.
He doesn’t discuss any of this with his pretty, blond wife, Lucy (Sarah Wright Olsen of “Walk of Shame”), at least not until he’s moving a pregnant Lucy and their two young children in the middle of the night to Arkansas to avoid Louisiana authorities coming to raid his house first thing in the morning.
The next organization to take an interest in and recruit Barry is the Medellin Cartel, a giant Colombian-based cocaine operation run by Jorge Ochoa (Alejandro Edda of “The Bridge”) and Pablo Escobar (Mauricio Mejia, who has appeared in Netflix’s “Narcos,” but not as Escobar, for the record). Barry passes an early test with them, and soon is in business with the cartel, as well as the CIA.
“You can stop now if you want,” Barry says a few years later into a video camera, filming what seems to be a confession. “(It) gets crazy from here.” Boy, he isn’t kidding. Working from a script by Gary Spinelli (“Stash House”), Liman — who last made the small-scale, intriguing 2017 war drama “The Wall” — gives us an adventure that’s at least as funny as it is thrilling. While the stakes for Barry are life and death, Liman from a tonal perspective is most interested in celebrating the absurdity of it all, and that approach really works.
If there’s a price to be paid for keeping things moving at a popcornchomping pace, it’s that secondary characters are underdeveloped — none more so than Lucy, who goes from suspicious-and-concerned wife to being pretty happy with the bags of cash hubby is bringing home in about a hot minute.
On the other hand, we get just the right amount of Gleeson (“The Force Awakens,” “Mother!”), whose Schafer, with his sly grins, appears to be enjoying getting away with playing it fast and loose with the rules almost as much as Barry is. It’s a small but really nice piece of work.
Of course, this is, as it always is when he’s involved, Cruise’s show, and even with a slight Louisiana accent that seems to come and go, he is terrific. With “American Made,” Liman plays to all the actor’s strengths, getting a performance that makes Barry entirely charming even when he’s committing crimes and consorting with incredibly unsavory people.
Perhaps you know how Seal’s tale of spying and smuggling concludes, but, if not, the film will keep you guessing.
Before that conclusion, there are “burn bags,” Oliver North, Manuel Noriega, a “million-dollar door” and much more.
“American Made” is a fantastic, if not entirely pridefully patriotic American success story.
With “American Made,” Liman plays to all the actor’s strengths, getting a performance that makes Barry entirely charming even when he’s committing crimes and consorting with incredibly unsavory people.