Summary
Familiar ground and character, but engagingly told with a compelling lead and a dedication to the notion of dramatic escalation.
Hollywood can’t seem to get enough of Pablo Escobar. In the last few years alone, we’ve seen Loving Pablo, The Infiltrator and the ongoing saga of drug trafficking in the 1980s in the Netflix series Narcos. The lure of dangerous people living on the fringes of legality has always appealed to audiences, but Doug Liman’s reunion with Edge of Tomorrow‘s Tom Cruise is not strictly a glorification of the criminal outlaw.
That’s because AMERICAN MADE isn’t about Escobar per se, but it does cross over into the well-worn territory. TWA commercial pilot Barry Seal (Cruise) is hired by the CIA as a delivery boy for the contras, but soon becomes a high-priced mule for the Medellin cartel’s drug trafficking organisation.
So while it isn’t covering the same ground, the film does use many of the stylistic tricks to sustain the story. Indeed, Seal’s character has previously been portrayed by Denis Hopper and Michael Paré on film, and most recently Dylan Bruno in Narcos. Director Doug Liman uses the latter’s documentary narrative structure, including to-camera interstitials from Cruise as a later version of Seal, but combines it with the intensity of The Wolf of Wall Street‘s opulence.
Which doesn’t detract from the engagingly told screenplay. The hyper-edited flashes of news footage and smash-cuts through time give the story a raw immediacy and makes the viewer complicit in what follows. “You can stop now if you want,” says Seal to camera, which might be a cheap trick of the narrator to sucker us further into the story, but it works.
It goes without saying that the typically charismatic Cruise is devilishly watchable, the perfect combination of smarmy and confident that is perhaps only challenged by Domhnall Gleeson’s slightly sinister and smug CIA man. Sarah Wright shines in a semi-comic role as Seal’s wife, while the distinctive looking Caleb Landry Jones (seen recently in the revived Twin Peaks) giving a delightfully weird turn as her redneck brother.
AMERICAN MADE is ostensibly a showcase for Cruise, but it’s also an entertainingly told capsule of an era. It’s also punctuated by some impressive aerial photography and flying sequences, albeit at the cost of two crew member lives. It may not break any new ground dramatically, and it is a tale that has certainly been told on screen more than once, but it’s also a hell of a lot of fun in the retelling. It’s also a timely reminder that the current US government is not the last time the US has made illicit deals with a foreign power.
