American Made review: When Tom Cruise is Tom Cruising, history takes a backseat

There's an incredible story to be told about the life of pilot Barry Seal, but it's buried under Cruise's usual perfect heroics

No other star in Hollywood is quite as painstakingly constructed as Tom Cruise. He’s the cowboy in the white hat for the modern era of cinema. He’s a flashback to the studio system in all its glory, when stars were less people and more the embodiment of a single ideal.

He’s the glint of pristine white teeth and the tip of a pair of sunglasses. He’s Tom Cruise: American Hero. Whatever oddities shape his life off camera (oddities, obviously, being an understatement here), the onscreen Tom Cruise is a celluloid god. He’s untouchable perfection.

When deployed in full force, it works perfectly. The Mission: Impossible franchise still reigns strong because the line between Ethan Hunt and Tom Cruise is almost negligible. Ethan Hunt is the cocksure adrenaline junkie. So was Maverick.

And so is Tom Cruise – that is, the Tom Cruise fed to us by Hollywood, the man who insists on performing his own stunts even as film studios wring their hands and beg him not to.

The problem is, American Made’s Barry Seal was a real person. And real people aren’t celluloid gods. They aren’t untouchable perfection. To those who crossed his path, Seal’s pilot-turned-smuggler ways may have possessed a certain charming bravado (the perfect Cruise archetype), but that was far from his entire being.

He also had a self-destructive level of arrogance; he pushed to cooperate with the US government not out of patriotic initiative, but because he’d do anything to save his own skin after getting caught. Seal knew his close ties with the infamous Medellín Cartel, whose leadership included Pablo Escobar, was his ticket to freedom; in the late ‘70s, he signed himself over to the DEA as an informant in order to escape jail time.

Eventually, he started helping the CIA smuggle arms and supplies into Nicaragua to help the Contra war effort, and his work landed him smack-dab in the middle of the Iran-Contra scandal of Reagan’s presidency. It also delivered him to the darkest of ends.

Barry Seal’s life is fascinating, and complex, to behold; it’s just a shame that American Made finds interest only in the purely superficial. Deep in the shadows of each frame lies the real drama, the embattled concept of someone who saw himself as a family man and defender of America’s freedoms and yet facilitated the rush of cocaine into the US to destroy the lives of its children. It’s felt, but at no point is it ever confronted.

A strange decision, certainly, for a story that readily presents itself as a classic fable. The traditional rise-and-fall as retold over and over in history: the greed, the ambition, and the fulfilment of the American dream with too much full-bloodedness. Ancient Greek mythology had Icarus; the Jazz Age had The Great Gatsby; 70s cinema had the Goodfellas; more recently, The Wolf of Wall Street took the archetype to some of its darkest and most hedonistic excesses.

All stories about men who feverishly chased the same thing that would be their own undoing; now, how exactly could Barry Seal not think double-crossing a cartel to save himself a trip to jail was playing with fire?

American Made, sadly, has no interest there. The film largely undoes itself in its own uncurious nature, with Seal’s fall merely fudged and sidelined, a footnote casualty of his wild-and-crazy life. Instead, we’re left revelling in the straightforward perks: the briefcases full of money, the plane tricks, sex in the cockpit.

This isn’t Seal. This is Tom Cruise: American Hero, his flaws quietly plastered over into waxy perfection. He’s the textbook husband to his wife (Sarah Wright, another actress in her early ‘30s playing a Cruise love interest despite, yes, looking like his daughter in several scenes), and the loving father to his two kids.

It’s all very flashy, and high octane, but not in any way that feels substantial. Or even that fun. Between the choppy editing, saturation so lurid it looks like an Instagram filter, and an interlude in which the “American Eagle” and “Commie Bear” fight it out on a cartoon map, American Made feels like nothing more than a ball of noise. This is director Doug Liman operating far more in the mode of Swingers than Bourne Identity here.

Tom Cruise, of course, remains as he’s always been. He feels just as monumental, just as exhilarating onscreen. But American Made offers nothing more than the most basic of platforms to let him shine, reducing a fascinatingly complex person to squeaky-clean heroics.

American Made hits UK cinemas 25 August.