Tom Cruise rediscovers a need for speed
Actor gets renewed vigour playing flim-flamming flyboy
Just when it seems it may be time to close the book on Tom Cruise’s acting career, something comes along to suggest new chapters are possible.
The something being Doug Liman’s true-life fly boy flim-flam saga American Made, a mostly factual and deeply cynical crash course in U.S. government misadventures in the late ’70s through 1980s, involving wars on drugs, Commies, Central America and anything else Uncle Sam didn’t like. After embarrassing himself with the horrific The
Mummy this past summer, and spinning his wheels before that on a needless Jack Reacher sequel, it was starting to look as if Cruise had finally reached the cheque-cashing phase of his lengthy career. Just take the money and run, Tom, run. Yet he rouses himself by reuniting with his Edge of
Tomorrow director Liman, who evidently knows how to guide the Cruise missile. This is one of the actor’s best performances of recent times, one that draws energy from a combination of two earlier characters: his smirking college-boy pimp of Risky
Business and his cocky flying ace of Top Gun. The shades he sports for most of American Made, as in those earlier two films, is Cruise’s way of letting us know he’s in on the joke, too.
What’s remarkable about the film, aside from the fact of how entertainingly it celebrates sin, greed, corruption and incompetence, is how willing Cruise is to play one of the dumbest people he’s ever brought to the big screen.
He’s Barry Seal, a commercial airline pilot who barely knows the geography of the world he zooms across and has no concept of what a kilogram is. He’s also reckless, pulling a midflight practical joke on his co-pilot that puts their lives and those of their passengers at risk. Cruise makes Seal sound like even more of a yokel with an unfortunate southern accent.
Yet Seal is such a talented airman, he could fly the proverbial camel through the eye of a needle, a skill that brings him to the attention of not only the CIA, but also members of the soon-to-be-notorious Medellin drug cartel, both of which use airstrips designed for stealth and not safety.
The CIA wants him to spy on and deliver guns to Latin American revolutionaries; the drug lords need him as a courier, and Seal is dumb enough to figure he can serve two masters — and others to come. He’s vaguely aware of the risks he’s taking, revealing to the camera in a confessional home video that “I do tend to leap before I look.”
He’s known as “the crazy gringo who always delivers” and deliver he does, making so much cash he literally doesn’t know where to stash it. Even Leonardo DiCaprio wasn’t this flush in his role as the eponymous financial raider in The Wolf of Wall Street.
Seal doesn’t waste any time thinking about the ethics of the situation, since many of his missions are at the behest of the CIA, represented with bloodless efficiency by Monty Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson), who assures Seal that he’s doing it all for love of his country — except for the times when he’s helping to poison his country by importing vast amounts of cocaine.
This wonky logic also seems to work with Seal’s untrusting yet devoted wife Lucy (Sarah Wright), who busies herself with making babies and counting greenbacks and decides not to ask too many questions about what her hubby is up to, intuiting that she’d be terrified of the answers.
She has good reason to fear. Seal’s daring ascents and landings are like mini-thrillers unto themselves, since a fiery crash seems always a heartbeat away.
It can’t last, of course, although Liman and screenwriter Gary Spinelli try to make it seem like it could for much of the movie’s 1:44 running time, which would have benefited from more editing and less ShakyCam.
There are other enticements for lingering. Among them are snapshots of the dubious intentions and misguided imperialism of no fewer than five U.S. presidents, one of them heard from but not seen and another glimpsed at an early age, played by a look-alike actor in a cameo too funny to spoil. The supposed forces of goodness in the film are about as capable as the CIA numbskulls of the Coen Bros.’ Burn After Reading, which is to say they’re not competent to do much of anything except cause mayhem.
They’re every bit as caught up in themselves and justifying their actions as Seal is, making it all seem appropriate that they’re yoked together under the film’s ironic handle: American Made, indeed.