American Made

You have to wonder if the real Barry Seal was as likable as the new true-crime thriller, American Made, makes him out to be, or if it’s simply Tom Cruise’s toothy charisma that makes him seem so. Certainly there’s not much on the surface to admire about Barry, a TWA flyboy who’s recruited by the CIA in the late 1970s to pilot reconnaissance missions to South America.

An opportunist to the core, Barry soon finds that running intel for the American government affords him the chance to make money in other ways, namely by smuggling guns for the Nicaraguan Contras and cocaine for Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel. If Barry is not quite devoted to his country, he at least appears to be devoted to his wife (blurry and loud love scenes where he manifests his devotion, along with frequent foul language, earn the movie an R rating).

Cruise, typically cast as a type-A, five-steps-ahead planner like Ethan Hunt (Mission: Impossible), here gets to cut loose as a man who never looks before he leaps. And cut loose he does, complete with a shaggy mullet, a developing paunch, and a swaggering Southern accent. Few have probably ever pictured Cruise as a Louisiana bayou boy, but he pulls it off in spades. It’s so much fun, you have to remind yourself you shouldn’t be rooting for Barry to get away with double-crossing Uncle Sam.

The movie wears its politics on its sleeve, effectively equating Oliver North and the rest of the Reagan administration with Barry and Escobar’s own lawlessness. It’s cheeky stuff that does score a few laughs (particularly with the appearance of a young George W. Bush) but never makes a strong argument. Indeed, rather like Cruise’s Barry, you can’t help feeling a good deal of affection for the Gipper’s old-school charm and wishing the whole Iran-Contra thing had worked out better for him.

For all that we like about Barry, though, his stranger-than-fiction tale of espionage, corruption, and drug running can’t help but end as a cautionary tale. However affable the sinner, the wages eventually come due.