American Made

American Made

One important question remains unanswered in “American Made,” the based on a true story black comedy: Why is this CIA operative/drug runner’s story being told as a movie instead of a book? What, exactly, does the film show that couldn’t have been relayed in prose?

Writer Gary Spinelli and director Doug Liman (“Edge of Tomorrow,” “Jumper”) choose to overstimulate rather than challenge with their portrait of American airplane pilot Barry Seal (Tom Cruise). They stress how much people liked him. They also put across how cool it was for him to fly from his Mena, Ark., base to South America on drug-drop errands there are lots of shots of Cruise grinning slyly from behind aviator glasses in extreme close-up before things got too crazy.

And Cruise’s smile is such a mercilessly deployed weapon at this point in Liman and Spinelli’s overwhelming charm offensive that you don’t get much into why Seal wanted more cash than he could ever spend given conflicting pressures from Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel and the American government to either quit or collude.

But you do get plenty of shots of Tom grinning from behind aviator sunglasses in extreme close-ups, many if not most of them lensed with hand held digital cameras that show you the wilds of Nicaragua and Colombia through an Instagram cheap green/yellow filter.

“American Made” may look like a deeper indictment of our hypocritical habit (as a nation) to take drug suppliers’ money with one hand and chastise users with the other. But really it’s just another sensational true crime story dressed up like a sub Scorsese status symbol: The movie seduces you, then abandons you.

The bewildering speed at which Barry’s life falls apart around Cruise keeps us disoriented; we can hardly be expected to develop any real sense about Barry as a person when even the movie itself which was written by Gary Spinelli and directed by Doug Liman (“Edge of Tomorrow,” “Jumper”) seems confused about his motives beyond caricature broad assumptions about his (lack of) character.

In 1977, for example, Barry impulsively agrees to fly shadowy CIA pencil-pusher Schafer’s (Domhnall Gleeson) spy plane over South American countries so he can take photos of suspected communist groups. Or at least that’s what we’re meant to think: The movie wakes up a sleeping co-pilot by sending its commercial airliner into a nosedive, then has Barry grinning like a lunatic when he tells wife Lucy (Sarah Wright) that once he opens an independent shipping company called “IAC” (get it? IAC-CIA?), he’ll figure out how to pay for their health insurance out of pocket. That kind of nutbar.

But if Barry is so impulsive, then why does he fly so low to land when taking pictures? And why doesn’t he immediately call Schafer upon being kidnapped and forced by Escobar (Mauricio Mejia) and his Cartel associates to deliver hundreds of pounds of cocaine to the United States? More importantly: Why does Barry think so little of his wife and kids that one night in the late ’70s, without explanation, he packs up their Louisiana house, moves them all to Arkansas and stuffs them into a safe-house there? There’s crazy like character-defining insanity and then there’s this barely makes sense in the moment when it is happening.

Mostly Barry appears to be the latter kind

There are two types in “American Made”: There are people who work and there are people who get worked. It’s easy to see the difference between them by how much screen-time Spinelli and Liman give each character, like Schafer, who is defined solely by the taunts he endures from a fellow cubicle drone and his own tendency to over-promise.

Schafer doesn’t do real work not in the eyes of these filmmakers. Same goes for Escobar and his fellow dealers, treated as lawless salesmen of an unsavory product. And don’t even start me on JB (Caleb Landry Jones), Lucy’s lazy, Gremlin-driving, under age girl dating, Confederate flag waving redneck brother.

But what about Lucy? She keeps Barry’s family together, but her feelings often go unconsidered even when she calls out Barry for abandoning her with no explanation so he can meet with Schafer. In response, Barry throws bundles of cash at his wife’s feet. The fight ends right there; the scene ends right there; it all ends right there like a smug joke that might as well have been There’s no problem that a ton of cash can’t solve.

“American Made” is selling toxic goods wrapped inside shallow anti-American Dream sentiment for anybody looking to shake their head about exceptionalism without thinking too deeply about what enables it this movie doesn’t say anything except Look how far a determined charmer can go if he’s greedy enough and determined. They respect Barry too much to be thoughtfully critical of him. And they barely hide their love for broad jokes that tease Barry’s team of hard working good’ boys and put down everybody else.

Now yeah sure it feels important that Barry ultimately meets some kind of just end but let me tell you: You don’t need to take seriously any finger-wagging from a movie that indulges you for two hours with Tom Cruise charming representatives of every US institution imaginable (they don’t call in the Girl Scouts, or the Golden Girls, or the Hulk-busters, but I’m sure they’re in a director’s cut). If “American Made” is a movie for any reason good or bad it’s that you can’t be seduced by the star of “Top Gun” on a page.

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