a few years back, in other words, nor is it
a variation on Liman’s earlier Bourne
Identity, in which the agency is portrayed
as impossibly omnicompetent and ruth-
less. Here the CIA is essentially clueless,
the Contras are mostly ethnic stereotypes,
and there’s no time spent at all on the drug
trade’s stateside impact. The only people
with plans that actually work are Seal and
the cartel, and the only question that we’re
asked to care about is how long he can
keep playing everyone against one anoth-
er before he gets a bullet in the head.
The agency is represented by Schafer
(Domhnall Gleeson, a little too Gaelic for
a preppy part), a handler who sidles up to
Seal when his TWA career is stalling and
lets him know that there’s another possi-
bility for a pilot of his talents: He can fly
around Central America, taking pictures of
Communist encampments, for Uncle Sam
and a pot of money. That pot, though, turns
out not to be quite deep enough for a man
with a wife and kids and grand ambitions,
and Seal soon stumbles into a better rack-
et: flying cocaine back to the States from
Medellín on his agency-supplied plane.
The agency officials don’t endorse this
course of action, but they don’t fire him,
either. They want to expand their opera-
tions in Central America, and Seal’s skills
are useful enough that they turn a blind eye
to his side business. So they set him up
with his own private airport, in Mena,
Ark.—the strange little place where far-left
and anti-Clinton conspiracies converge—
and put him to work ferrying guns to
Nicaragua and trainees back to the U.S.,
accepting that he’ll also be using these
routes for not-quite-legal cargo.
What they don’t anticipate is how much
of it he’ll carry, how rich he’ll get—he
and his wife, Lucy (Sarah Wright, nice tolook at in an underwritten part), are so
overwhelmed that they end up stuffing
cash into hay piles in their barn—and how
all the money will make it impossible to
keep the operation secret. Soon his feck-
less brother-in-law is attracting local-
sheriff attention, the DEA is circling, and
we enter the phase of the movie that does
have clear factual grounding, when Seal
has to add “drug informant” to his grow-
ing list of job titles.
As a story, American Madeis entertain-
ing but forgettable. Liman’s dad was the
counsel to the Senate’s Iran-Contra inves-
tigation, but the shaggy-dog plot and
cynical view of U.S. foreign policy don’t
display any hint of expertise beyond
what you’d expect from Hollywood. The
scuzzy vibe belongs to a middling caper
movie, and we’ve seen antiheroes get
rich and then get way over their heads
many times before.
What we haven’t seen as much recent-
ly, and what justifies the movie, is Tom
Cruise’s returning to his ’80s roots. Barry
Seal is a characteristic Cruise perfor-
mance, but in a style that he has seldom
used since he reached middle age: not the
intense action-hero mode that he so often
favors now, but the cocksure charmer, the
handsome guy who winks at you while he
gets away with it, who appeared in differ-
ent variations from Risky Business and
Cocktail and Top Gun and even Rain Man
down to his time-to-grow-up swan song
in Jerry Maguire.
This guy, it turns out, is still a guy that
Cruise can play—and if anything, he’s a
little more charming with the faint signs
of age you can see around the edges of his
Dorian Gray good looks. And even in an
only-okay movie, nostalgia is a kick: It’s
nice to have this Tom Cruise back.F
ORthe 2014 sci-fi flick Edge
of Tomorrow, Doug Liman
persuaded Tom Cruise to step
outside his comfort zone and
play a sniveling, unheroic coward who
gets stuck in a time loop and killed time
and time again. The movie was proba-
bly the most effective recent deploy-
ment of Tom Cruise’s Tom Cruiseness
to some end other than straightforward,
grim-faced, high-exertion heroics: You
showed up to watch the most famous
ageless face in show business whinge
and cower and get rubbed out by aliens
every ten minutes, and the experience
was pretty entertaining.
In this fall’s American Made, Liman
and Cruise have teamed up again, but this
time the part is less of a stretch and more
of a return to long-gone form. Cruise is
playing Barry Seal, a former TWA pilot
and roguish Louisiana charmer who got
rich flying drugs and guns around Central
America in the 1980s and ended up saving
his own hide (for a while) by turning infor-
mant for the Drug Enforcement Agency.
No, let me rephrase that: He’s playing
the version of Barry Seal that certain
left-wing investigators of our Deep State
have insisted was the real one. This
Seal wasn’t just a daredevil smuggler
and scoundrel turned DEA informant;
he was—allegedly—running drugs for
Pablo Escobar and his pals with the
knowledge of his handlers in the CIA.
How plausible you find this depends on
your appetite for rumor, hearsay, and con-
spiracy. The movie doesn’t much care
whether you do believe its story (one of its
taglines is “based on a true lie”), and while
it has tacitly left-wing politics, the messag-
ing is secondary. Mostly it has a larkish,
root-for-the-rogue spirit in which you’re
supposed to roll your eyes at how easily
Seal exploits the anti-Communist fervor
of Reagan-era Washington rather than
shake a fist at the CIA’s machinations.
This isn’t the Gary Webb “Langley and
the Contras caused the crack epidemic”
fantasia that got the feature-film treatment
SPONSORED BYNational Review Institute 47Film
UNIVERSALPICTURESCruise
Control
ROSS DOUTHATTom Cruise in American MadeText