American Made wants to be a fast, funny ride through the life of Barry Seal, the pilot who flew for the CIA and the Medellin cartel before becoming a witness for the prosecution. It mostly gets there, but the movie can’t quite hold its own weight across its three hours.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
Barry Seal’s Double Life
Barry Seal is played by Tom Cruise, and he carries the picture. The film opens with Seal working honest jobs, then moves him into the world of covert flights for the CIA. That work leads him to Colombia, where he becomes a courier for Pablo Escobar’s drug empire. The film treats this shift as a matter of fate, a man caught between two jobs he never asked for.
The script, written by Paul Greengrass and Eric Roth, leans on humor to keep the pace up. The jokes land some of the time, but the film also asks viewers to sit with the moral cost of Seal’s work. That balance doesn’t always hold.
The Problem With Three Hours
At 165 minutes, American Made runs long. Some scenes feel padded, and the middle stretch drags while the film circles back to Seal’s family life. The pacing slows down just when the story needs to pick up speed.
The supporting cast is solid. Domhnall Gleeson plays the agent who brings Seal into the CIA’s orbit, and Jesse Plemons plays a young agent who watches Seal’s rise from afar. Their scenes are sharp, but they get less room than the script needs.
“I’m not a bad guy.”
That line, spoken by Seal himself, sums up the film’s central tension. He believes he’s doing good work, even as he flies contraband for a man who kills anyone who crosses him. The film never fully answers whether that belief holds up.
Where It Lands
American Made is a technically proficient picture with a weak sense of scale. It knows how to stage a chase and a shootout, but it struggles to make the stakes feel personal beyond Seal’s own perspective. The film’s ending tries to tie everything together, but the loose threads don’t quite come together.
Cruise gives a committed performance as a man torn between loyalty and conscience, and the film’s best moments come when it lets him play both sides at once. But the script never gives him enough to work with, and the final hour stretches thin.
Final Word
American Made is a watchable, uneven film about a man who couldn’t say no. It has a strong lead performance and a few sharp scenes, but it loses focus over its running length and never fully earns its ending.
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