Movie Review: Cruise's enjoyment of his 'American Made' role infectious

If you've ever read about the history of the Medellin cartel, the war on drugs or the US's Cold War escapades in Latin America, chances are you've come across the name of Barry Seal.

Seal was a good ol' boy from Louisiana whose lifelong passion for flying led him first to Vietnam and then to become the youngest commercial pilot working in the fleet of Trans World Airlines.

In the late 1970s Seal was recruited by the CIA to run guns to the Contras in Nicaragua, following which he fell in with Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel. He later turned on them, leading to his very bloody and well-publicised assassination in 1986.

Seal was a pudgy, John Candy-looking kind of man but in American Made, Doug Liman's film adaptation of the book by Shaun Attwood, Seal is played by the much leaner Tom Cruise.

The movie takes a slightly glib approach to its antihero, portraying him as a charming, morally shifty man whose success relies on equal parts luck and sheer adventure-loving, hell-raising, what-the-heckness.

It allows Cruise to exercise the freewheeling charms that made him a star in 1980s films such as Risky Business, Cocktail and Top Gun. You could argue that Seal is the sleazier side of the coin to Top Gun's gung-ho flyer Maverick and Cruise's enjoyment of the role is infectious.

WATCH the trailer for American Made

•While some may have preferred a more Oliver Stone-style treatment of how Seal maneuvered within the paranoid worlds of drug-dealing, CIA intrigue and Cold War insanity, this is not that kind of film.

It is however thoroughly entertaining and has enough snappy one-liners and so-crazy-they-could-only-have-come-from-real-life moments to keep audiences scratching their heads in disbelief.

In the age of series like Narcos, Snowfall and the Cocaine Cowboys documentaries, American Made has few revelations and only a thin veneer of compelling dramatic tension.

However it does have an engaging performance from an actor all too often under-utilised in formulaic action roles - which reminds us why he became one of the biggest stars of his generation in the first place - and a story that's interesting and gobsmacking enough to keep you watching throughout. 

• This article was original published in The Times.