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Saturday, October 12, 2024
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HOLLYWOOD AMERICAN MADE
EDITOR'S PICK
American Made': Visually rustic and mildly thrilling (Review By Troy Ribeiro ; Rating: ***)
Director Dough Liman's "American Made" is a good example of greed and the
epic culture of corruption in the US. Based on a true story, it reveals the
thrilling life of an opportunist.
Narrated in a non-linear manner with archived video footage, the plot unveils
how during the height of the Cold War, in the mid-1970s, Barry Seal (Tom Cruise)
the youngest pilot for the commercial airline TWA got into a crazy mess.
Barry explains how he was enticed by Monty Schafer, a CIA agent, to fly
clandestine reconnaissance missions over South America using a small plane with
cameras installed to snap photos of warring insurgents on behalf of the US
government.
But, what starts with taking photos of insurgent groups in the jungles of
Central America quickly morphs into a courier service between the CIA and
General Noriega in Panama. And this soon leads to him using his CIA-provided
twin-engine plane to transport drugs into Louisiana from Colombia. The Medellin
Cartel kingpins Jorge Ochoa (Alejandro Edda), Carlos Ledher (Fredy Yate Escobar)
and Pablo Escobar (Mauricio Mejia) make him an offer he cannot refuse.
Being a CIA mission aircraft, the CIA turns a blind eye to the drug smuggling,
but the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) tracks him down. Schafer warns
Seal of the consequences and protects him from the DEA by moving him to a remote
town in Arkansas called Mena and in reciprocation, forces him to transport guns
to the Contras.
Realising that the Contras are not serious about the guns, Barry starts
delivering the guns to the Cartel. Apart from this, on the behest of the CIA, he
transports the Contras to the US and sets up a military training base for them
near his home town. The militants, however, escape from the training programme,
making the CIA shut the programme down.
In the meanwhile, Barry surfaces on the radar of the FBI, DEA and other law
enforcement agencies and with the CIA abandoning him, how he dodges the agencies
and brokers a deal with the White House, which eventually leads to crossing and
double crossing forms the crux of this tale.
While the actual story of Barry Seal is exciting, the facts and figures in the
narrative don't make an impact. But it definitely hits the right spot for a
fact-based, journalism inspiring story about flamboyant figures who were a part
of an even bigger, crazier story of the Cold War era.
Visually, the film is rustic and simple. The period is captured by the agitated
style and fusing palette of the Uruguayan cinematographer Cesar Charlone. His
frames are banal and yet arresting.
Director Liman does his best to keep this top-heavy narrative in constant motion
without approaching the technical or structural inventiveness of his previous
films. The storytelling is both so distracted and distracting that there is
barely time to consider what it all adds up to.
The editing by Andrew Mondshein is somewhat haphazard. Some scenes do end
abruptly.
On the performance front, Tom Cruise is every inch Barry Seal. He punches his
emotions with apt precision, be it the thrills, the insanity and "patriotic
duty" he delivers it all with a straight face with barely a trace of irony or
repentance.
Sarah Wright as his wife Lucy Seal has nothing much to offer except for
initially screaming, "Daddy's lost his mind", in her effort to comfort their
small children on the night of the hasty "we've got to leave town" moment.
All supporting characters playing the contras and the drug lords along with
Caleb Landry Jones as Seal's idiotic brother-in-law and Jesse Plemons as the
local Sheriff add colour and flavour to the narrative.
Overall, while the details are dazzling, the final effects of the film are
mildly thrilling but yet far from tame.
In Universal Pictures’ American Made, Tom Cruise reunites with his Edge of
Tomorrow director, Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith), in this
international escapade based on the outrageous (and real) exploits of a hustler
and pilot unexpectedly recruited by the CIA to run one of the biggest covert
operations in U.S. history.
Based on a true story, American Made co-stars Domhnall Gleeson, Sarah Wright,
E. Roger Mitchell, Jesse Plemons, Lola Kirke, Alejandro Edda, Benito Martinez,
Caleb Landry Jones and Jayma Mays. The film is produced by Imagine
Entertainment’s Academy Award®-winning producer Brian Grazer (A Beautiful Mind),
Cross Creek Pictures’ Brian Oliver (Black Swan) and Tyler Thompson (Everest),
Quadrant Pictures’ Doug Davison (The Departed), and Kim Roth (Inside Man). Gary
Spinelli wrote the screenplay.
