There's really not much in American Made that you haven't seen before, often in lesser movies, but sometimes in better ones. Tom Cruise, playing a real life character named Barry Seal, is charismatic as can be, and is really the saving grace of this otherwise very mediocre effort. As an unhappy and overworked pilot for TWA airlines in the late 1970s, Seal is recruited by CIA for top secret operations in Central America, and is eventually entangled into the Colombian Medellin drug ring that includes the likes of Pablo Escobar. He also juggles several children of his own, and a marriage to a blonde bombshell (Sarah Wright), whose white trash brother (Caleb Landry Jones) arrives one day at their doorstep and threatens to ruin their up-until-now rather profitable existence.
The movie's Lord of War-meets-meets-Blow structure should be familiar to an average movie goer, but what is disappointing is the somber bummer of an ending, which goes against the movie's rather lengthy comedic tone up until that point (since it's based on true events, I guess they couldn't go against the grain and provide a somewhat more elated conclusion). Director Doug Liman and Cruise have made better movies before (Edge of Tomorrow is one of the most memorable sci-fi action movies of the last decade), but here they get a bit too comfortable with the familiarity of 1980s archetypes of the smuggling trade. If nothing else, American Made proves that Cruise alone can still carry a movie, despite his recent struggles to rule the box office the way he once did.
B-
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