American Made

I expected this movie to be mindless, meaningless fun. For the most part it is, with a major caveat — it’s also a movie in which two people died bringing to screens. So if you find yourself watching American Made, just remember: A pilot and a crew member gave their lives for this. This vanity project — in which Tom Cruise plays a role he’s 20 years too old for, in which he and his pet director du jour, Doug Liman, allegedly proceeded to repeatedly up the stakes in an escalating war of aerial stunt demands — cost two men their lives. Two guys died. For this. Was it worth it? I’m going to have to go with “no.”

To be fair, I can’t think of many movies that I would say warranted an on-set body count — but this one definitely wouldn’t make the list. Cruise’s character is loosely based on Barry Seal, a commercial airline pilot with a penchant for some lightweight smuggling that placed him squarely in crosshairs of the CIA when the agency needed off-the-books reconnaissance work done in Central America. This led to Seal’s involvement with Air America, the Medellin cartel and the Iran-contra debacle — and while the details are based in reality, Cruise and Liman don’t get too hung up on the facts. Both seem more concerned with inducing their shared love of flying and kitschy Regan-era nostalgia — think American Hustle meets Top Gun by way of Blow, without the fun or originality those comparisons might imply.

Liman doesn’t exactly falter stylistically so much as he simply fails to do anything that raises the film beyond a workmanlike period programmer. The entire enterprise feels like a B-budget exploitation flick with millions of dollars stuffed down its gullet in an attempt to create the cinematic equivalent of foie gras. And while his direction seems largely joyless, he does manage to coax solid supporting performances out of Domnhall Gleeson and Sarah Wright Olsen, and the aforementioned aerial stuntwork is pretty damned impressive on the big screen.

Though Liman’s work proves competent if uninspired, it’s Cruise himself who drags Made down into a morass of mediocrity. It’s as if the supporting cast is trying to, you know, make a movie — but every time Cruise steps into the frame he sucks all the life out of the scene. As penned by screenwriter Gary Spinelli — whose only other feature credit is a 2012 Dolph Lundgren vehicle called Stash House — Seal comes across as an affably dimwitted adrenaline junkie in over his head by virtue of opportunity and circumstance. And yet Cruise plays Seal with all the zeal of an acting school dropout polishing a character for a tedious one-act play. It’s a role that might have worked with Matthew McConaughey circa 2007, but not Tom Cruise in 2017.

American Made could be read as an appropriate proxy for the times it represents — a period of excess for its own sake, in which no one seemed willing to question decisions that would ultimately prove disastrous for all involved. For a film ostensibly based on shadowy conspiracies with indelible geopolitical consequences, it seems sad that the only conspiracy to concern Cruise and Liman is the one in which they convinced a studio to foot the bill for an exotic vacation with lots of planes for them to fly. It’s not the worst American Made mistake — but taken in the context of its story, that’s really not saying much. Rated R for language throughout and some sexuality/nudity. Now Playing at AMC River Hills Classic 10, Carolina Cinemark, Biltmore Regal Grande, Epic of Hendersonville.