Tom Cruise’s new movie American Made is a film about a dark and complicated period in American history told like it was a goofy lark. It’s all about the CIA spying on various communist-backed rebels in Latin America, arming Contras, selling guns, and allowing drugs to be run via their civilian couriers. It should be a serious-minded, brow-furrowing drama but the film is (deliberately) light on its feet, funny, and ultimately a kind of piffle of a movie. If you sneezed, it’d blow away on the wind, never to be remembered again.
Tom Cruise is man who has these allegedly true adventures. No doubt the real person was a shitty drug-dealing, gun-running person, but, hey, It’s Tom Cruise!
Cruise is just an average, bored Pan Am pilot, who runs Cuban cigars on the side until he’s approached by a guy who never fully acknowledges he’s CIA. They want Cruise to take surveillance pics in a small plane of the communist soldiers in S. America… which he does well but that doesn’t put meat on the table. So he accidentally falls in with the Medellin drug cartel in its early days and starts moving cocaine for Pablo Escobar. And then guns. Manuel Noriega is involved too. He hires more pilots and then finds himself so saturated with cash, he doesn’t know where to store it.
This all plays like 100% less debauched version of The Wolf of Wall Street or Scarface without any cock-a-roaches or chainsaws. You know, a crime movie where you root for the bad guy because he’s got so much charm… but the film is more a light comedy that trades on Cruise’s natural (and present) charisma. You can’t hate this cocaine-runner not just because the script is so light and nimble, but because you can’t hate that smile.
Ultimately, the movie does very little beyond informing us how crazy nutbar the whole lead into the Iran/Contra affair was. The film has a “if this wasn’t history, you wouldn’t believe it” feel as Cruise, a kind of dim guy, just keeps failing upwards until he reaches the White House. Someone could accuse the movie of not taking history seriously but that person would be missing the point. It knows it’s a puff of hazy smoke and I think that light, preposterous tone is supposed to make you think what we inadvertently let our intelligence agencies do when we aren’t paying attention. It’s this dumb, poorly planned, and thoughtless.
So, yeah, this is a light, enjoyable film that you may not remember a few weeks after seeing it. But it’s still lightly enjoyable at the time of watching it. I was never bored, I was always entertained. Not hugely, but by enough.
Score: 81