Cruise’s second collaboration with director Doug Liman (they previously brought us the unexpectedly great sci-fi action film, Edge Of Tomorrow), American Made requires quite a bit more from the Hollywood stars than just winning smiles and stunts – though the movie does deliver plenty of those too. Cruise plays Barry Seal, a former TWA commercial pilot who, at the behest of an enigmatic guy with a beard who calls himself Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson) winds up flying planes for the CIA. American Made begins with the words “Based on a true story”, which is just as well, since Seal’s story becomes so outsized and so improbable that it almost defies credibility. The tone, jukebox soundtrack and structure all place the movie in the Scorsese school of crime dramas, but Liman gives the movie enough rough 70s-80s texture – all film grain, handheld cameras and golden lighting, like an old Kodak colour print – to make American Made stand on its own. As we’ve seen in his earlier films, from Go to The Bourne Identity to this year’s The Wall, Liman’s also an astute crafter of suspense, black comedy and gasp-inducing rug-pulls: there’s a moment involving a plane, stacks of cocaine and a purloined bicycle that is as funny and bizarre as anything you’ll see in a bawdy R-rated comedy. Yes, American Made is another picaresque indictment of the American dream, but it is, if anything, more cynical than even Wolf Of Wall Street. Liman’s film depicts Seal’s gathering wealth and his fractious relationship with his wife, Lucy (Sarah Wright, great in a role that could have done with beefing up), but this is really a back door into a bigger, even darker story: the secretive triangle between government agencies, the military and criminal organisations in Central America. Decisions that could mean the deaths of thousands elsewhere around the globe are made seemingly on a whim by young guys in offices somewhere in America; when those decisions cause all kinds of political nightmares in Washington, a couple of stooges around the periphery are thrown to the wolves while the system grinds on as normal. Aided by Gary Spinelli’s sharp, snappily economical script, American Made tells a tall, often startling tale with pace, suspense and a mile-wide streak of grim humour. It’s another mischievous, intelligent and thrilling film from Doug Liman – arguably one of Hollywood’s most individual directors.
title: “American Made Review” ShowToc: true date: “2025-07-30” author: “Stacy Pendleton”
Perhaps that’s why Liman takes so few risks with his latest film, American Made, starring Tom Cruise. What could have been a clever, acerbic assault on America’s foreign policy legacy is, instead, a toothless tale of one man’s inadvertent participation in America’s often hypocritical post-Vietnam War policies in Central America. It’s hard to know if this movie would feel different were it not a true story. It might be criticized for its outlandish plot, which seems too crazy to be true — but it might also come across as less callous. Liman plays Seal’s oafish involvement in this historically-significant illegal operations as comedy, but it’s not very funny — especially if the viewer spends any time thinking about those who were caught in the real-life crossfire. In American Made‘s characterization, Barry is your classic Chaotic Neutral character. This might not be a problem, if contextualized with any kind of specificity. Instead, the narrative is Chaotic Neutral, too, not bothering to make too fine a point with the story of Barry’s dealings. This movie wants to be Breaking Bad — they even cast an underutilized Jesse Plemmons as an Arkansas Sheriff — but it forgets to include any form of moral agency. What’s left is Forrest Gump… if Forrest were a greedy, over-confident narcissist. Like Breaking Bad, Barry seems to feel justified in his choices because he has a family to (financially) provide for — that ultimate metric of masculinity. Mainly, this family is represented by Lucy (Sarah Wright, 22 years Cruise’s junior), Barry’s babely wife who yells at Barry whenever he plays fast and loose with their family’s safety, but only enough to earn her status as A Real Spitfire. She’s this movie’s version of the male fantasy “Cool Girl.” Instead of drinking beer and never nagging her husband to pick up after himself, she drinks beer and never nags her husband to stop making unilateral decisions that endanger their children just so he can do cool loop-de-loops with his plane. While American Made has seemingly endless founts of sympathy and context to throw in Seal’s direction, it has almost none for J.B. (Caleb Landry Jones), Barry’s brother-in-law, a character who represent the most stereotypical traits of the white Southern man. Barry and Lucy may have Southern accents, but they are the classy kind of Southern. J.B., however, is the “white trash” kind, and the narrative revels in that distinction. J.B.’s greed is treated as evil because it is clumsy and it is expressed without a wink. J.B.’s greed is also, may it be noted, deemed the larger problem in a scene where it is also implied that he is about to take advantage of a 15-year-old girl. In American Made, the American dream isn’t just about making money; it’s about making money with a smarmy, white-toothed grin on your face. Yellow-teethed folks with any haircut resembling a mullet need not apply. For an American film industry that has started making films like Logan Lucky, Winter’s Bone, and even Dale and Tucker vs. Evil, it’s a lazy characterization of white poverty. American Made isn’t unentertaining. Though the movie has an almost two-hour runtime, you will not be bored. Let it never be said that Cruise does not make for a charismatic point-of-view character and narrator. Most of the story is told after-the-fact by Seal as he records video diaries while on the run in 1981-82. We even get fast-paced expository montages featuring maps, arrows, and Cruise’s dulcet, voiceover tones. However, this rigid point-of-view limits the kind of story American Made can tell without fully embracing the complications of Seal’s subjectivity. Seal doesn’t seem particularly interested in understanding the cultural and political nuances in the different Central American countries he does business in, so neither is the movie. We have so much of the context of Seal’s story, and so little of the context for the non-Americans in this movie. Places like Nicaragua and Panama are interchangeable here, and the people who reside in these places even more so. It’s a missed opportunity. If American Made isn’t going to play with the line between what is true in Seal’s story and what is his own, ego-driven perspective, then it needs to broaden its context. Perhaps I am wildly misjudging the aim of this film. Perhaps American Made is not an effort to articulate the hypocrisy at the heart of American foreign policy. Perhaps, instead, it is solely concerned with glorifying the cheap thrills of power, money, and masculinity. If that’s the case, then — as George W. Bush would say — Mission Accomplished.
