Tom Cruise plays Barry Seal, a TWA pilot who flew cocaine for the Medellín Cartel and ran guns for the Nicaraguan Contras, in Doug Liman’s American Made. The film is a crime comedy, which is a strange way to sell a story about a man who buried his drug money in suitcases in his own backyard. It works more often than it should.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
A Baton Rouge Pilot and a CIA Case Officer
The setup is simple. In 1978, Seal is flying commercial jets for TWA and smuggling Cuban cigars on the side. A CIA case officer named Monty Schafer recruits him to fly reconnaissance over Central America in an Aerostar 600 fitted with aerial surveillance cameras. Seal takes the job and hides it from his wife, Lucy.
Then the 1980s arrive and the arrangement gets dirtier. Schafer has Seal courier between the CIA and General Noriega in Panama. On one of those runs, the Medellín Cartel picks him up and asks him to fly cocaine home to the US. He does it, airdropping the drug over the Louisiana countryside. The CIA looks away. The DEA does not.
Gary Spinelli’s script keeps the mechanics clear, which is the film’s real strength. Every scheme lands as a scheme, not a montage. Liman shoots Seal’s double life as a job — paperwork, flights, drop points — and the banality is the joke.
Mena, Arkansas, and the Money in the Yard
Seal moves his family to Mena, Arkansas, to dodge the authorities, and Lucy comes around to the wealth his side job produces. The town gets rich as a hub of US cocaine trafficking. Schafer then sends Seal to run guns to the Nicaraguan Contras in Honduras. The CIA sets up a Contra training base in Mena, and Seal flies the Contras in. Many of them escape as soon as they arrive.
Seal sees the Contras aren’t serious about the war and just want to get rich, so he starts selling the guns to the cartel instead. He makes so much money he buries it in suitcases in the backyard.
It’s not a felony if you’re doing it for the good guys.
That tagline is the whole movie in one line, and the film knows it. Cruise sells Seal as a grinning opportunist who never quite admits what he is. Domhnall Gleeson’s Schafer is the better performance — pleasant, vague, and completely without a conscience. Sarah Wright’s Lucy carries the domestic half, and Jesse Plemons shows up as Sheriff Downing.
Caleb Landry Jones plays JB, Seal’s freeloading brother-in-law. In the film, JB moves in, steals money, and is arrested with a briefcase full of cash. The script leaves what happens to those charges unresolved; what the film does show is that Seal buys him a plane ticket to Bora Bora for his safety, JB demands weekly cash and insults Lucy, and a car bomb placed by the Medellín Cartel kills him. The cartel had promised to “take care” of the JB problem.
| Date | Release |
|---|---|
| August 18, 2017 | Taiwan |
| September 29, 2017 | United States |
The film grossed $134 million worldwide and drew generally positive reviews, with most praise going to Cruise. It runs 115 minutes and played in 2D and IMAX in select theaters. It was Liman’s first film for Universal since The Bourne Identity in 2002.
What the Film Gets Right and What It Skips
The problem is tone. American Made wants the audience to enjoy Seal’s hustle and also to feel the weight of what the hustle funded, and it never picks. The Contra material is where that split shows worst — the film treats a real foreign policy disaster as another wacky errand.
This is not a great crime film. It is a good one with a great lead performance and a script that trusts its audience to follow the money. The suitcases of cash in the backyard are the image that lasts.
6.5 of 10.
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