American Made

Stories of international drug running often seem to leave me a little cold - often following a somewhat predictable arc from first days of enjoying the fun and profitability of the business, then slinking into the mire of getting high on your own supply and drifting further into drug addiction before a decline and miserable end. "American Made" doesn't quite follow that arc, although the initial signs aren't entirely promising. Based on true stories, it first establishes the usual elements - hotshot, somewhat naive TWA pilot agrees to help the CIA take photos over South America, and South American drug cartels persuade him to start flying their product back north of the border. Things get interesting, however, when he dodges drug enforcement through CIA help, relocating to a small town in rural Arkansas, where his business undergoes a wild, government sponsored expansion, and the challenge becomes as much to launder the ridiculous amount of money he's getting as it is to navigate the gaps between different government agencies.

Tom Cruise is, to put it mildly, a divisive actor, but in this one, partially because he's playing a guy who's frequently a couple of steps behind the 8 ball and only succeeding due to bigger figures manipulating him, the off-putting over-confidence is played way down and he's something closer to a regular human being. Domnhall Gleeson has been frequently impressive and wildly different in films like "Frank", "Ex Machina" and "Brooklyn", and is something again wildly different as the CIA agent leading our hero further into temptation. Director Doug Liman lays on a reasonable number of tricks, including montages and a recurring motif of Cruise narrating events to videotape from the perspective of 1985, letting us know where we stand. And as a film that interrogates some of the CIA's more dubious behavior, it ends up packing quite a bit of a punch by the end. So surprisingly successful.