Review - American Made (2017)

American Made - The touching tender story of Tom Cruise, his tousled hair, and a whole bunch of the following:  drugs, guns, dangerous people, dangerous situations, and naughty US government shenanigans.   It also features a quick guest appearance by Kentucky Fried Chicken and who doesn't love that?

It’s a nice thing that Tom Cruise is getting a little older.  While this is usually a terrible deal for people in Hollywood, in his particular case it means that he can branch out from playing the cocky young guy all the damn time.  He still unreasonably handsome and confident but he is more capable of playing believably world-weary characters.  As his character is revealed as being a bright young star in the commercial aviation firmament that ends up finding himself in a stable but staid and unfulfilling job, the audience can relate to why he would consider heading down the path he chooses.  The filmmakers are sure to leave little crumbs for the audience to pick up - his toying with the passengers and co-pilot, his low grade/low risk smuggling e.g - so that his decisions later are not completely out of the blue.  You can never really not realize that it’s him - hell, it’s Tom Cruise - but his acting and expressions give some more meaning to his character’s general feather-in-a-whirlwind experience.

The thing that really stood out about the story for me was the brazen (and probably more true than not) behavior of his main government contact and the escalating levels of government all seeking to use him for their own agendas.  Inversely, it shows the lower and lower levels people are willing to sink to when they think they are combating a greater evil.  I was a kid in the late 70’s and early eighties and remember hearing about Colombia and Nicaragua, the Sandinistas and the Contras and the Medellin Cartel on the news.  I remember Reagan telling us in his folksy but ultimately duplicitous way about bad guys in Central America and how we were going to help those fighting them.  Lots of sighs and head shaking from grownups at the time but no one would have guessed the level of wild-ass crap going on in the name of the citizens of the US back then.  It’s probably instructive to remember how shocked people were when the Iran-Contra deal was brought to light when nowadays we read about vague reports of the US “helping” those who are fighting bad guys in the Syrian Civil War.

Lastly, in a macro way, the prevalence of life stories about crime and criminals may be having counter intuitive societal effects.  It usually used to be that when crime was shown as a lifestyle in the movies, it would end with the criminals come-uppance.  See “Angels With Dirty Faces” or the original “Ocean’s Eleven”, e.g.  As of late, some pearl-clutchers may worry that movies such as “The Wolf of Wall Street” and similar shows may incite viewers to try and emulate the crimes shown rather than give them a proper tsk-tsking.  People might erroneously think that they could totally get  to the deliriously wild lifestyles depicted in these movies and, what’s more, they would never be caught because they’re just so much smarter than the protagonist.  “Oh, that won’t happen to me… I gots a system!”  While there is some hazard in celebrating the excesses of successful terrible people (see 2016 Presidential Election, e.g.) I think in the bigger media picture one could argue that the opposite is true.  The phrase “And then it all went bad…” originating in the E! True Hollywood Story series is as familiar to people my age and younger as  “Made it Ma!  Top of the World!!” from White Heat used to be to earlier generations.  It’s not a bad thing necessarily but nearly all of these Crime Pays type movies formulas call for the inevitable fall.  One can sit in the theater and know with utmost certainty that when they get to the part where the protagonist is rolling in cash and smiling all the time and going to parties that a giant problem is right around the corner.  It’s just possible that viewers, sensing this pretty much inevitable change, would be able to get the permanent idea that you really can’t get away with it and nearly everyone who turns to a life like this will crash.