Is Tom Cruise's New Movie 'American Made' Any Good? Here's What The Reviews Say
RIFFING ON THE REAGAN YEARS
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Being the world's last true movie star and real-life Dorian Gray was not enough to help Tom Cruise buoy his last film, "The Mummy." "American Made," which opens Friday September 29th, pairs Cruise with director Doug Liman (Cruise's "Edge of Tomorrow," "The Bourne Identity") for a larger-than-life espionage/crime romp. Cruise dons his aviators and lends his grin to Barry Seal, a hot shot pilot (cough "Top Gun" cough). Is this classic Cruise or another zombie-like disaster? Here's what reviews say:

It's A Comic Take Loosely Based On A Semi-True Story

Cruise's Seal is a hotshot TWA pilot who's tapped by an ambitious CIA handler (Domhnall Gleeson) to fly over Latin American hot spots and snap pictures from his twin-propeller plane. Soon he's making cash-for-intel handoffs with Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, running drugs for Pablo Escobar, and acting as a go-between in the Iran-Contra affair. He goes along with it all because he never stops to think too hard about what he's doing. Plus, his wife (Sarah Wright Olsen) back home in Arkansas likes the spoils. When it all goes belly-up, everyone seems to know that he'll be the fall guy — except him.

[Entertainment Weekly]

​He cut a deal to incriminate bigger players and claimed he had been involved with government intelligence agencies from the outset – this movie sportingly takes him at his word.

[The Guardian]

Seal has already been the subject of a bad Dennis Hopper movie—1991's Doublecrossed (click at your own risk)—and there, he comes off as a hero thrown under the bus by a shady government. But in American Made, as played with a gleeful mock-heroism by Cruise, Seal becomes a comical mix of being in on the joke and, fatefully, not. It doesn't ever seem to occur to him that trying to play both the U.S. government and the Ochoa brothers is a bad thing: smartly, or dumbly, he doesn't let that stand in his way.

[The Ringer]

You've Probably Seen A Hard-To-Believe True Story Movie Like This Before

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. "Shit gets really crazy from here," Seal even admits in one of several grainy, after-the-fact camcorder confessionals, a somewhat clunky framing device the film uses in lieu of voiceover.

[Variety]

Kudos are due to Liman and Spinelli (whose future collaborations include upcoming TV series Impulse and sci-fi film Chaos Walking) for honing the script into a reasonably manageable two-hour romp around the Byzantine conspiracy-caper seen through the eyes of Seal. Wisely, they've opted not to get too clever with the chronology, and tell the story straight through with only the occasional narrator's interjection via a videotaped "confession" or home-movie memory from Seal (recorded circa 1985 on a wonderfully ugly VHS rig).

[The Hollywood Reporter]

The plot largely amounts to a series of escalating missions until Seal recognizes, a bit late, that he's in too deep. It owes more than a little of its style and ideas to Goodfellas, in other words, but that's no crime. There's a frame narrative meant to justify a Henry Hill-esque voice-over: video diaries Seal shoots in the '80s while on the run. That's a screenplay crutch, but whatever. It helps to have a tour guide through the story's weird complications.

[The Ringer]

Cruise Is In Fine Form, Even As The Film Tweaks His Image

With his pearly shark's grin, always-underestimated comic timing, and macho daredevil streak, Cruise rips into the role and summons a side of himself that he rarely lets his guard down enough to reveal. He's playing that quintessential American type: a jerk who's so entertaining to watch, you almost hate yourself for rooting for him. Cruise should lose control more often.

[Entertainment Weekly]

Even with both feet on the ground, Cruise isn't entirely safe. When Gleeson's Schafer first confronts Seal with evidence of illegal cigar-smuggling, that familiar grin first freezes, then dies on the actor's face, as though April Grace's "Magnolia" journalist had just walked into the bar. As Seal rolls and lurches through this plot, Cruise sweats and panics in ways Jack Reacher wouldn't countenance; in jail, the character even loses a tooth, albeit a discreet back molar. (Nobody's paying to see Tom Cruise turn into Walter Brennan just yet.)

[IndieWire]

The man who for much of the Eighties and Nineties was the biggest movie star in the world has done his share of good and bad work in the past decade or so, but American Made is his first effort in a long while that feels like an honest-to-god Tom Cruise movie; suddenly, his smile means something again. But there's one huge, beautiful catch: Doug Liman's electric film is clear-eyed about the cynicism and corruption beneath its hero's anxious grin. It voraciously breaks down both the star and the country he has symbolized for so much of his career.

[The Village Voice]

'American Made' Is More Like Liman's Old Films Than His Other Cruise Flick 'Edge Of Tomorrow'

Director Doug Liman, who commanded Cruise's best non-Impossible mission of the past decade with Edge Of Tomorrow, throws back to the jitters of his itchy earlier movies like Swingers and Go. He establishes staccato editing rhythms early on, intercutting the monotony of Barry's airline job with his wife Lucy (Sarah Wright Olsen) preparing for his return.

[The A.V. Club]

Fusing the lickety-split comedy of his "Swingers" days with the more businesslike action smarts of his latter-day Hollywood works, Liman does his best to keep this top-heavy narrative in constant motion — without approaching the technical or structural inventiveness of his previous Cruise collaboration, 2014's undervalued sci-fi mindbender "Edge of Tomorrow."

[Variety]

You Don't Spend A Lot Of Time With Secondary Characters

American Made has such style and energy that its hasty patchwork of a narrative becomes a kind of charm unto itself, even when it means losing track of talented actors. The movie gins up a whole supporting roster of barely-used characters, including husband-and-wife cops in Barry's new home of Mena, Arkansas, played by Jesse Plemons and Lola Kirke in what feels like the trace remains of what was once a subplot.

[The A.V. Club]

From Seal's redneck brother-in-law (a typically slithering Caleb Landry Jones) to a suspicious local sheriff (Jesse Plemons, who seems to have suffered most in the edit), such figures add little color or credibility to the film's comic-book reportage.

[Variety]

While Jesse Plemons and Lola Kirke's pairing as a shrugging sheriff and his more vigilant wife looks to have been a lamentable cutting-room casualty, others have the time to make more persuasive and valuable contributions: the emergent Sarah Wright Olsen impresses as Seal's wife Lucy, calling out her man's wilder maneuvers on the homefront, and Caleb Landry Jones is touching as a tragically weak link in the whole criminal enterprise.

[IndieWire]

Though Fun, 'American Made' Seems A Little Disposable

Strangely, for a Cruise vehicle, "American Made" takes a while to get going, and, having never quite started, it doesn't really know when to finish. There's a terrific climax involving the CIA, DEA, FBI and a bunch of other acronymical forces — except it isn't the climax, and the movie drags on for quite a while after, forgetting that we really don't care much for the underwritten storyline of Barry's family and his wife Lucy, gamely played by Sarah Wright ("Marry Me") in that increasingly thankless position of "girl in Tom Cruise movie."

[The Wrap]

As a character, [Seal] lacks depth and flavor. We don't even get to enjoy his sinking to the bottom of the moral pit given that, despite the fact that he's smuggling product for the biggest drug cartel in the world, he never does anything naughtier than drink some tequila shots and set off the odd firework. You get the feeling that you're just supposed to love the guy because he's played by Tom Cruise.

[The Hollywood Reporter]

This movie feels like the CliffsNotes version of every movie it's trying to be. The basic bullet points are all here, but presented in summary fashion. On the other hand, the movie avoids wearing out its welcome, accordingly. You won't be bored. All the good scenes are too short, but all the bad scenes are also, thankfully, too short.

[The Ringer]


TL;DR

Think of American Made as the real, secret sequel to Top Gun: the one where Maverick enters the private sector and pursues the capitalist dream of selling drugs and guns to murderers and calling it Freedom™.

[The Village Voice]


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