Doug Liman directs Tom Cruise, Sarah Wright and Domnhall Gleeson in this true tale of a pilot who quits his steady commercial airline job and starts working for the CIA, the Contras and eventually the Medellin cartel. 

Now this is much more like it. Cruise’s first serious lead role since Valkyrie and it buzzes with quality. It is an effervescent, propulsive tall tale that grips and makes you giggle. Reviews have unfairly written off American Made as just another Blow or War Dogs. And while it is in love with the domino rally structure of Goodfellas just as much as any of those hollow copycat flicks, it is a more nuanced and entertaining drug smuggling piece. We don’t merely follow the rise and fall of a luxury scumbag. We follow a family man who decides to abandon the safety net he placed himself in, and for a while thrives living on the edge of a razor blade. We are introduced to Barry Seal flying a full airliner, going by the flight plan, all operating lights lit. His co-pilot is asleep, as are all his passengers back there. So he decides to click off the auto pilot and try a little free fall. And we follow him from there on out, one miscalculation away from being terminal wreckage. Each humorously threat laden episode sees a cocksure middle-aged man jerking and plunging his solid existence into more and more dangerous territory. He flies too low over military bases he needs to photograph, taking flack he could avoid from a sensible height. He drags the wife n’ kids away at night to a new rural home, the cops passing them as they turn out of the driveway. We essentially run with a man constantly putting his steady life in peril and watch as the CIA and Pablo Escobar exploit this. American Made is a kind of a suburban 9to5er existence slapstick show plus a bonus Reagan-era satire to boot. And when his downfall comes, his cocksure grin can’t protect him. Hell, he loses some trademark dazzling white teeth by the first act but he keeps on smiling. He crashes his plane in a way that would make Goose and Iceman cry. Cruise’s Top Gun aviator shades and his running shoes have already been stolen off him by freedom fighters he has arrived to “assist.” He turns up again, smile at full beam, with Playboys, a case of Jack and only a baseball bat as protection. How else are you going to give these guys their guns? The joke is clear; everyone (Escobar, the Contras, the Sandinistas) wants to be American, while the American success story wants action and danger and oblivion. He ends up making confessional tapes. He wants someone to talk to. He wants to reveal what the American Dream looks like while your eyes are closed dreaming; what is happening outside the borders to make that myth work. But his co-pilot and all the passengers are still asleep. America does not care what is being done in its name. American Made delivers this message lightly and with deft humour. Liman ably uses Cruise as both an icon and a desperate charm power tool. As the life threatening set pieces and dirty money pummel over us, we are always thoroughly with Golden Tom. We want him to win (still four decades of winning on), to get the girl (even though she is now already his wife) but we want to see him do it clinging by his fingertips, grinning that million dollar smile at us like a deflector shield, as the weight of the real world drags him down.

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