When Tom Cruise is at his charismatic best, he works with great directors: Steven Speilberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, and now Doug Liman. Liman worked with Cruise on the really amusing Edge of Tomorrow, better remembered as Live. Dive. Repeat. They join forces again on this tale of Barry Seal and his role in the Iran Contra Scandal. In American Made Cruise is in peak form, giving us a potential insight into his future roles as he ages out of running away from things…
Barry Seal (Cruise), apparently, was a BIG part of the Iran Contra Scandal run through the Carter and Reagan administrations. Coerced by ‘Schafer’ (Domhnall Gleeson) in the CIA, Seal starts patriotically enough, taking reconnaissance photos of communist insurgents in Central America. However, Jorge Ochoa (Alejandro Edda) and Pablo Escobar (Mauricio Mejia) convince Seal to make some quick stops over to Colombia to help distribute cocaine into the United States. However, he is successful, so the US government moves Seal, his wife Lucy (Sarah Wright) and Barry’s family to Arkansas to expand his operations. Barry does expand his patriotic efforts….in addition to his drug smuggling, and finds himself directly in the middle of several ongoing investigations into the drug cartels, communist insurgents, and US government malfeasance. Pretty impressive for a bored former TSA pilot.
I get why Doug Liman might want to direct this movie: Barry Seal could potentially make for an interesting central figure. However, I think he’s focused on the wrong side of this story. The way the government uses Seal and hilariously contradicts what its commander in chief is saying is the juicy material. The best scenes of the movie involve how the government in equal parts aided Seal and tried to bring him to justice, including just a hilarious late night raid on an airport. In addition, we get enough of the bureaucracy to know that they also try to cover their tracks when Seal becomes compromised. Maybe getting that material was too hard, but that context would give American Made more bite and scathing satire toward the lengths a government will go to to promote “democracy.”
However, the story Liman tells is about Barry Seal. There’s definitely plenty of juice here: Barry was playing both sides of a war against each other to profit for himself and his family. Clearly his recorded tapes influenced the story, so he must have had some sort of take on what he was doing. However, Liman (and screenwriter Gary Spinelli) elect to make Seal a blank slate who does things….for his family I guess? That type of amorality can be interesting but as the movie is played for political satire, it would be good if we had some understanding of what Seal thought of his actions. It speaks highly of Cruise and Liman that even though American Made is kinda hollow at its center, their charm carries the movie until an amusing detail of drug smuggling or government incompetence can be used for laughs.
American Made is a fine movie, that’s it. Doug Liman and Tom Cruise know what it takes to keep audiences entertained, and they make the most out of the story they chose to tell. I kinda wanna see these tapes though. This Barry Seal almost seems like a last ditch conspiracy attempt to deflect blame on the government for the Iran Contra Scandal. Maybe I’ll start watching Narcos to see if he shows up…