Movie Review—American Made

Theatrical release poster

by Peter J. O'Connell

American Made. Released (USA): Sept. 2017. Runtime: 117 mins. MPAA Rating: R for language throughout and some sexuality/nudity.

Tom Cruise first attracted widespread attention in 1983's Risky Business, as a young entrepreneur in a dubious enterprise. In 1986's Top Gun, he became a superstar by playing a swaggering, smirking Navy pilot. Many of the actor's subsequent roles have shown the influence of these two roles. This year's American Made, a dramedy directed by Doug Liman, is no exception.  

Loosely fact based, the movie tells the story of Barry Seal (Tom Cruise), a commercial airliner pilot—the youngest in TWA history—who has some wild and crazy adventures, on both sides of the law, in the wild and crazy late 1970s and the 1980s. Bored in his job with TWA, Barry accepts an offer from Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson), a CIA operative, to work for the agency flying clandestine reconnaissance missions over rebel camps in Central America, in a small plane at low altitude with cameras installed. Barry's cover is as an “Independent Aviation Contractor” (love those initials!). 

Successful in these dangerous assignments, Schafer has Barry start functioning as a courier between the CIA and Panama's General Manuel Noriega (Alberto Ospino), who provides information on leftists but also has ties with the notorious Medellin drug cartel of Pablo Escobar (Mauricio Mejia). The cartel abducts Barry and gets him to agree to fly cocaine with him on his return trips to the United States. Soon Barry is flying large quantities of coke into the Louisiana swamp country and making huge amounts of money. The CIA looks the other way, but the DEA doesn't. To save Barry from arrest, the CIA moves him and his family to Mena, a small town in Arkansas. 

There Barry continues his drug smuggling with the aid of some cronies whom he dubs the “Mena Air Force.” After a time Schafer has Barry bring in counter-revolutionary (Contra) Nicaraguans for training, most of whom split into the American night as soon as they arrive. Schafer also has Barry run arms to the Contras in Nicaragua itself, but Barry soon starts trading these arms to the cartel. 

Swaggering, smirking—and sweating in the tropical heat—Barry manages to keep all these balls in the air while being a good family man to his wife (excellently played by Sarah Wright) and kids. He is making money by the suitcase-full but remains pretty much a “good old boy,” happy when he is in the small Southern town.

The atmosphere of hijinks with an edge is well maintained by director Liman throughout the movie, aided by interesting cinematography and a score of 1970s-1980s hits. (Particularly effective is a sequence of Barry under fire in the sky scored to “Hooked on Classics.”) Inevitably, however, what goes up—like all those balls in the air—must come down. The film's mood darkens as Barry offends the cartel and finds CIA support disappearing. The roguish antihero's swaggering and smirking—done so entertainingly by Cruise—become definitely replaced by sweating, the cold sweat of fear at that.