MOVIE REVIEWS
‘AMERICAN MADE’
R 1:57 ★★★★
There are basically two kinds of Tom Cruise performances, and both can look pretty similar on the surface. Each likes sunglasses, going fast and smiling big.
He never exactly loosens up or slows down — the most unfathomable thing of all in Cruise’s world. But most of Cruise’s best and most interesting performances (“Magnolia,” “Jerry Maguire,” “Collateral,” “Eyes Wide Shut”) have allowed some chink in the well-tanned armor, some hint of darkness underneath the rakish boyscout, some hollowness in the soul of America’s ageless action-movie avatar.
Cruise’s latest is the smart, zippy “American Made,” a movie that plays very much like your type-A Tom Cruise movie before it yanks the rug out from beneath you and reveals the B-movie Cruise we’ve been missing. It’s a fiendishly perfect vehicle for Cruise that returns him to the cockpit, 31 years after “Top Gun,” and it simultaneously reminds us of his preternaturally winning movie-star charisma while subtly deconstructing it.
In “American Made,” a loosely true tale set in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Cruise plays Barry Seal, a TWA pilot whose on-theside smuggling of Cuban cigars brings him into the orbit of the CIA. An officer named Shafer (Domhnall Gleeson) turns up, and offers him a job taking surveillance photos and making government payoffs to the likes of Panama’s Manuel Noriega in Central America. “We’re building nations down there,” says Shafer, giddy.
Blithely, even charmingly ignorant of the dangerous and ethically questionable terrain he’s entering, Seal is soon cheerfully smuggling enormous amounts of cocaine back to Arkansas for Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel. On both sides of the law, things escalate quickly. Seal and his family (Sarah Wright Olsen plays his wife), can’t spend their money fast enough. They run out of closet space and backyard holes for all the cash coming in.
It’s an increasingly absurd circle of drugs, guns and money, all ostensibly for the fight against “enemies of democracy.” The ironies mount, topping out with Nancy Reagan’s war-on-drugs plea to “say no” while her husband’s secret efforts to arm militants is fueling one of the most powerful drug cartels in the world.
“American Made,” written by Gary Spinelli, has glossed up the story, of course. Seal’s life wasn’t nearly so shiny as it is as played by Cruise. But then again, whose is?
Starring: Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson, Jayma Mays and Sarah Wright. (Language throughout and some sexuality/nudity)
— Jake Coyle, Associated Press