American Made (2017)
Directed by Doug Liman
The true story of pilot Barry Seal, who transported contraband for the CIA and the Medellin cartel in the 1980s.
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Spinelli clearly is crazy about Scorsese’s “GoodFellas,” and he has structured “American Made” in roughly the same picaresque fashion.
On those superficial levels, it probably does deserve some comparison to such classics as “Goodfellas,” “Casino” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
It seems to want to be Goodfellas and it’s not that monumental, but citizens should know about the shady schemes in which its government agencies were involved.
Delivering the kind of arsenic wit we haven’t seen since “Goodfellas,” it explores a world where good and evil exist not only side by side, but usually hand in hand.
It shows its references, a combination of “Goodfellas,” “Blow” and “Scarface,” but never achieves the internal consistency of those films.
The slick surface of American Made largely plays like another variation on the rags-to-riches-to-crash-and-burn trajectory of movies like Scarface and Goodfellas, with a healthy helping of flexible history, a la American Hustle.
You could say it’s like “Blow,” on well, blow.
Taking structural cues from stuff like Goodfellas and Blow, Liman has fun within the sub-sub-genre of crazy Americans doing crazy American things for a lot of money.
His tale is a reminiscent of George Jung, the drug dealing kingpin whose misadventures were chronicled in Ted Demme’s Blow (released back in 2001).
(It’s funny to remember that Cruise almost starred as Henry Hill in the 1990 classic.) We’ve seen this sort of sarcastic structure applied to less successful criminal history lessons like “Blow,” “Lord of War” and last year’s abysmal “War Dogs,” but none of those films had this one’s bratty, propulsive energy.
Its colorful style recalls the flamboyant amorality of GoodFellas and Blow, and it’s often funnier and more succinct than either.
As a high-wire criminal balancing act in the vein of Goodfellas or Blow , American Made is adequate (nowhere near the former; more enjoyable than the latter).
It feels, for better or worse, like a film he could have made at almost any point in the last 30 years: As Cruise’s character here puts his prodigious aviation skills to wildly irresponsible use, it’s tempting to imagine Liman’s film as an oblique spiritual follow-up to the adventures of flashy Navy pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, beating tardy forthcoming sequel “Top Gun: Maverick” to the punch.
Three decades after playing swaggering Navy ace “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun, the actor once chosen as People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive (1995) is back, climbing into the danger zone in this comedy-drama based on the real life of a former TWA pilot who became involved with a South American drug cartel in the 1980s.
Playing a pilot recruited by the CIA to fly covert missions under specious motives, his Barry Seal is as far from Ethan Hunt or Jerry Maguire or Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell as any role can get.
Seal is depicted as a doofus, the government crackdown on drugs is intercut with scenes of Ronald Reagan in Bedtime for Bonzo.
To go by the film’s account, Seal simply winked and smiled his way into becoming a critical player in the Iran-Contra affair of the mid-1980s, and his blithe detachment from the political specifics of the scandal (he admits to an affection for Ronald Reagan, but principally on the basis of “Bedtime for Bonzo”) brings to mind a smoother-operating Forrest Gump.
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And it is, for a while, as Uruguayan cinematographer César Chalone (City of God) lays on vibrant images to a golden oldies soundtrack (think "A Fifth of Beethoven" and "Hooked on Classics").
It’s an entertaining one, shot in a variety of textures by City Of God cinematographer César Charlone: Exterior shots often pop with saturated color, while interiors have the faded look of a CRT display.
Liman has more potent ploys at his disposal, like the cinematography of César Charlone, who shot “ City of God ” (2002), and who endows the new film, especially in its early patches, with the hot-but-faded glow that you get from an old transparency.
The visual structure of American Made is erratic, combining a warm colour scheme (the frame looks like it’s been rubbed in orange rind) with wobbly camerawork from Uruguayan cinematographer César Charlone, who shot the 2002 classic City of God .
Enlisting “City of God” cinematographer César Charlone proves a canny move, as the Uruguayan’s roving, agitated camera style (not to mention a perspiring, overripe palette, heavy on hot yellows) implies antsy tension even in comparatively banal domestic scenes.
Liman writes each change in location, alliance and job across cinematographer César Charlone’s (Oscar-nominated for City of God ) warm-lit frames, or tasks editors Saar Klein (After the Fall), Andrew Mondshein ( The Mummy ) and Dylan Tichenor ( Triple 9 ) with keeping things snappy.
On those superficial levels, it probably does deserve some comparison to such classics as “Goodfellas,” “Casino” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
Think Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, a tour-de-force performance that saw the hero of Titanic and Inception not simply play a villain but a morally bankrupt real-life stockbroker.
We've seen this with “Goodfellas” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
Instead, it is just the result of Tom Cruise watching The Wolf of Wall Street or Pain & Gain and tailoring an off-the-rack version into a movie where Tom Cruise essentially plays the least interesting version of Tom Cruise more than he does Barry Seal.
Imagine The Wolf of Wall Street with the edges sanded off and you have something approximating American Made.
“American Made” is a better, more intriguingly conflicted project than (a generation ago) “Air America” with Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr. as heroin smugglers in the Vietnam War.
It’s “Blow” and “Air America” and “Narcos” all rolled into one laugh-through-the-grimaces romp, a picture so clever its damning history lesson may be ignored by those who don’t know history, and cannot recognize when it repeats itself.
“ American Made ” is basically a mash-up of “Air America” and “Goodfellas,” with Cruise using his own piloting skills to do stunt work.
If “American Hustle” is arguably the best of that particular sub-genre and the odious “War Dogs” is one of the worst, then “American Made” falls pretty much squarely in the middle of those two—it is funnier and not nearly as smugly repellent as “War Dogs” but it lacks the craft, cohesion and wit of “American Hustle.”
The slick surface of American Made largely plays like another variation on the rags-to-riches-to-crash-and-burn trajectory of movies like Scarface and Goodfellas, with a healthy helping of flexible history, a la American Hustle.
Gary Spinelli’s script follows in the recent tradition of “War Dogs,” “Gold” and “American Hustle” — all high-flown, fact-based tangles of individual and institutional corruption — by blatantly owning up to the absurdity of its real-life premise.
The movie has the comedic tone of the 2013 David O. Russell film "American Hustle," about the FBI-driven Abscam sting of the early 1980s.
Aspiring to be Goodfellas but more closely aligned with American Hustle’s manic irreverence, the film has a doozy of a story to tell, and so naturally it would have been far more effective if it had simply told its story rather than endlessly marveling at its own madcap absurdity.
The story, culled from a funny, breakneck script by Gary Spinelli, is one of those I-can’t-believe-it’s-true jobs like “American Hustle,” where you’re sure it defies credulity until you go to Google and are shocked to learn that about 90 percent of what you just saw really happened.
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Barry is the kind of charismatic sleazeball that James Woods used to portray in films like Salvador and The Boost.
Mostly, there’s Cruise, who at 55 looks a decade and a half younger, and can still fill a cockpit with star power some 30 years after “Top Gun.”
The best idea that “American Made” has to offer involves casting Tom Cruise, whose hit films “Risky Business” and “Top Gun” made him the toothy poster boy for the rampant materialism and the lighter side of military expansion of the very same era when Seal’s story was happening in real life, in a role that theoretically stands as a rebuke to those notions.
An accessory that Cruise made wholly his own in “Top Gun,” they connote as much rakish bravado and slightly impenetrable machismo now as they did then — 1986, coincidentally the year that the action in “ American Made ,” which spans eight fast years of Carter-to-Reagan-era governmental skulduggery, comes to a startling head.
Mercifully, the ‘70s and ‘80s-set “American Made” comes without a Bryan Adams-sung theme song, but Doug Liman’s film cannot overcome the strangeness of Cruise attempting to reclaim “Top Gun” glory as a twentieth century good old boy.
Whether it’s Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia or Maverick in Top Gun, the 55-year-old actor burrows deep into his characters’ ability to hustle, scam or charm all those around him.
Doug Liman’s pulpy action-comedy about a pilot who smuggles drugs for the Medellin Cartel in the ’80s has Cruise sporting feathered hair, hip-hugging jeans, and sleek leather jackets, invoking the cool he exuded in his Top Gun days.