‘American Made’ Review: Exhilarating, fun and provocative

“The next 5 years will be worse than the past 5 years,” declares US President Jimmy Carter in the quick, witty and inventive opening of Doug Liman’s American Made.

The ominous line, spoken several decades ago, feels terrifyingly true today with Donald Trump and his mercurial moods steering America in this very troubled times. In fact, Liman’s film, about the misadventures of real-life commercial pilot-turned-drug runner Barry Seal (Tom Cruise), feels frightfully and humorously current despite its being committed to its period setting. America hasn’t changed much. It is pretty much still the land of opportunism.

Routine and repetition

American Made is all about routine, repetition and Barry’s hilarious struggles to escape it.

We first see him piloting a commercial plane, looking direly bored as he tells his passengers that their take-off is delayed because of traffic on the runway. He’s finally up in the air, with his co-pilot asleep.

In an ingenious way to reveal why a seemingly good American would be daring enough to quit his lucrative and very stable job as a pilot to do the dirty and dangerous job for his government, he decides to manually fly the plane to fake a turbulence all for kicks and thrills. Barry’s an adventurer. He’s also a survivor. All it took was a nudge from a CIA agent (Domhnall Gleeson) to have him fly guns and coke in and out of America.

Of course, the biggest joke of American Made was that Barry will never be able to escape routine and repetition. Much of the film has Barry do the same things over and over again. Sure, the stakes escalate, the morality of his efforts become further blurred, and his connection to America’s role in international conflicts become clearer, but he’s still pretty much doing the same things over and over again up to the very end.

 

Inescapable loop

Liman and Cruise are of course not strangers to mining comical absurdity out characters who are caged in an inescapable loop. The Edge of Tomorrow (2014), their last team-up, exploits the wit and conceit more overtly, with Cruise playing a soldier from the future who has to relive the same day over and over again.

American Made however feels more ambitious in its reach. The film is a biting satire. It is critical not just of America’s questionable hobby of interfering with other nations’ destinies but also of the arguably amoral way it does so, which counters all of the nation’s proclaimed virtues.

Cruise, who has previously played shining examples of the affable and noble American in Top Gun (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), deliciously transforms into a charmingly vile soldier of fortune here, an exciting anti-hero whose inability to balance values and adventurism provokes trouble. The flagrant cluelessness he injects into a character whose fealty to opportunism and moral ambiguity are very much alarming is strangely charming, resulting in a film that has its audience wildly rooting for an outlaw whose greed ultimately catches up with him.

A lot of fun

American Made is adamantly a lot of fun. It is also unflinchingly political. Beneath its frenetic and exhilarating exterior that fictionalizes recent history seemingly for the sake of brash entertainment is a provocative discourse about the continuing and startling conundrum that is America. – Rappler.com

 

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ ‘Tirad Pass.’ Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema.

 

 

Editor’s Note: In an earlier version of this article, the quote  “The next 5 years will be worse than the past 5 years” was attributed to US president Gerald Ford. The quote was from US president Jimmy Carter. We apologize for the error.