9 / 10
Official trailer
A Pilot Gets Bored
In the late 1970s, Barry Seal is a commercial pilot for TWA, bored out of his mind, smuggling Cuban cigars on the side for a little excitement. Then a CIA officer named Monty Schafer, played by Domhnall Gleeson, approaches him in a hotel bar. How would Barry like to fly a small plane over Central America, taking reconnaissance photographs of communist rebels?
Barry says yes without a second thought, and from there the story spirals out of control. On one of his flights, he’s picked up by Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa brothers of the Medellín cartel, who offer him a fortune to fly cocaine back into the United States. He says yes to that too. Soon he’s working for the CIA and the cartel at the same time, and neither minds.
I had a blast with this one. It’s the kind of true story that makes me laugh at things I probably shouldn’t, and Cruise sells every bad decision Barry makes like it’s the best idea anyone ever had. I can’t think of a Cruise film where he looks like he’s having more fun, and that fun is contagious. Doug Liman directed it in 2017, reuniting with Cruise after Edge of Tomorrow, and it’s one of Cruise’s most enjoyable films: fast, loose, funny and a little bit crazy, like the life it’s about.
For Writers
Barry says yes to every offer, each one bigger and more dangerous than the last. The story escalates because the character can’t say no.
A protagonist with a single, compulsive flaw can drive an entire plot. Barry’s inability to resist a thrill or a deal pushes the story forward, and every yes raises the stakes.
Build your story on your character’s defining weakness. Each time they give in to it, make the consequences bigger, until the reader can see exactly where the road leads, and the character can’t. That gap between what the reader sees and what the character refuses to see is where both the comedy and the dread come from.
Cruise Having Fun
Tom Cruise plays Barry as a grinning, charming, amoral good old boy from Louisiana, a man who can’t resist a thrill or a deal. He’s in over his head from almost the first scene, and he knows it, and he keeps going anyway, because it’s the most fun he’s ever had.
This is a looser, more playful performance than Cruise tends to give.
He’s not an invincible action hero here. He’s a guy who crash-lands in suburban streets covered in cocaine, gets arrested by what looks like every law-enforcement agency in America at once and talks his way out of it with a smile. Cruise clearly relishes the chance to play someone reckless and a little ridiculous, and his energy carries the whole film.
This is my favorite kind of Cruise. I like him fine as the invincible action hero, but I like him better grinning while everything collapses around him. The suburban crash, where he climbs out covered in cocaine and still seems pleased with himself, is the funniest thing I’ve seen him do on screen.
Mena, Arkansas
As the operation grows, the CIA sets Barry up in Mena, a small town in Arkansas, with an airfield, hangars and a fleet of planes. The money pours in faster than he can spend or launder it. He buries it in the garden, stuffs it into closets, hides it in the horse stables, and still there’s too much.
The scenes of Barry’s absurd wealth are some of the funniest in the film. Bags of cash pile up in every room, a bank in town opens almost entirely to handle his deposits and a family tries to live a normal life surrounded by millions in drug money. The town of Mena gets rich along with him, and nobody in town asks any questions.
For Writers
Barry has so much cash he buries it in the garden and stuffs it into closets. The absurd details make the scale of the operation vivid.
A single ridiculous, concrete detail can convey scale better than any number. Readers can’t picture millions of dollars, but they can picture a man burying bags of cash in his backyard because he’s run out of places to hide it.
When you need to show that something is huge, find the small, specific, slightly absurd detail that proves it.
Numbers inform. Images stick. Barry’s buried cash, his overstuffed closets and the bank that opens just for him tell the reader more about the scale of the operation than any figure in a ledger ever could.
Guns for the Contras
Then the CIA changes the job. Now it wants Barry to fly guns to the Contras, the rebels fighting Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.
He does, and the Contras, not much interested in fighting, sell many of the guns to the cartel instead. Barry ends up flying guns south and drugs north on the same planes, and the whole operation becomes a farce.
The film suggests that American foreign policy in the eighties created a system where the government, the cartels and the rebels were all tangled together, and where a charming pilot could become rich serving all of them. It’s funny, and underneath the jokes, it’s furious. Nobody in the chain cares what the guns or the drugs do once they land. They just want the planes to keep flying.
This stretch is where the film goes from fun to sharp for me. Guns south and drugs north on the same planes is a sight gag, and Liman plays it as one, but the joke is on the people who built the system. The anger under the grin is a big part of why I rate it a 9.
The Videotapes
Videotapes that Barry records near the end of his life, explaining his story to the camera, frame the film. They give the film its playful, confessional tone, and they let Cruise address the audience directly, joking and bragging about how it all happened.
Liman shoots the film with a loose, energetic style, full of handheld camerawork, freeze-frames, archival footage and animated maps. It feels like a caper movie, and it moves at a tremendous pace. At under two hours, it never drags for a moment.
Family
Sarah Wright plays Lucy, Barry’s wife, who’s alarmed, then thrilled, then alarmed again by the money and the danger. She’s more than a bystander: she knows what Barry’s doing, and she enjoys the life it gives them, until the danger comes too close. Caleb Landry Jones plays JB, her reckless, idiotic brother, who moves in with them and nearly brings everything crashing down.
The family scenes give the film a welcome touch of warmth and a little sadness. Barry loves his wife and children, and the film shows how his choices put all of them in danger.
True Story, Loosely
American Made is based on the real Barry Seal, a pilot who did work for the Medellín cartel and later became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration. But the film takes huge liberties. It invents Schafer as a composite, simplifies the timeline and presents Seal as far more likeable than the real man, who was by most accounts a much harder, more ruthless figure, and physically nothing like Tom Cruise.
It acknowledges this with its opening title card, based on a true story, and it plays more like a tall tale than a documentary. That’s the right choice. It’s a satire about the absurdity of American policy. A biography it isn’t.
Baton Rouge
The story ends badly, as the real one did. After the cartel discovers Barry has become a government informant and the government abandons him, he’s sentenced to community service in Baton Rouge. In 1986, cartel hitmen find him in his car in a parking lot and kill him.
The ending hits me like a door slamming. After all the jokes and the money and the swagger, Barry dies alone in a parking lot, used up and thrown away by everyone he worked for. I think that turn is the smartest thing the film does, because it makes me feel a little guilty about how hard I laughed.
For Writers
After all the comedy, Barry dies alone in a parking lot. The grim ending reframes the whole story.
A sudden shift in tone at the end of a story can be powerful, forcing the reader to reconsider everything they found funny or exciting. The contrast makes the ending hit harder.
If your story is light, a dark ending can give it unexpected weight, but only if the darkness has been hinted at along the way.
American Made plants the danger early, so the ending feels inevitable instead of arbitrary. Every joke about the cartel carries a flicker of fear, and the fear finally arrives in a Baton Rouge parking lot. My piece on humor in writing digs into this.
Monty Schafer
Domhnall Gleeson plays Schafer, the young CIA officer who recruits Barry, and he’s one of the film’s best elements. Schafer is polite, nerdy and completely amoral, a bureaucrat who treats covert war as a series of career opportunities. He keeps asking Barry to do more, promising protection he can’t deliver.
He’s a composite invented for the film, standing in for the whole apparatus that used Seal and then dropped him. I love what Gleeson does with that. He plays Schafer with a mild, smiling reasonableness that scares me more than any snarling villain could, because this man would sign off on your death between meetings and feel fine about it.
The Cartel
The Medellín cartel is shown with a kind of comic menace. Escobar, Jorge Ochoa and their associates are charming hosts one minute and terrifying killers the next, and Barry’s dealings with them are both funny and frightening. When he’s arrested in Colombia, it’s the cartel that gets him out, and he knows exactly what he owes them.
In real life the cartel’s violence was staggering, and the film doesn’t dwell on it, but it never lets you forget it’s there. Every deal Barry makes with them tightens a noose he doesn’t seem to notice.
Planes
Seal was, above all, a brilliant pilot, and the film’s flying sequences are terrific. Barry flies tiny, overloaded planes into jungle airstrips too short to land on, dodges ground fire, drops bales of cocaine into Louisiana swamps and, in one memorable scene, crash-lands in a quiet suburban street, climbing out covered in white powder.
Cruise, a keen pilot himself, did much of his own flying, and the aerial scenes have a real, physical energy. They’re the adrenaline that powers the whole film.
The Cost of the Joke
Occasionally, American Made treats serious subjects too lightly. The cocaine Barry smuggles devastated American cities, and the Contra war killed thousands of people, and the film cares more about the comedy of one man’s adventures. Some viewers will find that glibness hard to accept.
That glibness does bother me a little, and it’s the one reservation I have.
I still come down on the film’s side. The lightness shows how an entire system could treat drugs, guns and lives as a business, and how easy it was for an ordinary, likeable man to slide into it. The laughter makes the ending hurt more, and I think Liman knew exactly what he was doing.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Drug smuggling and covert war become a breezy caper in American Made, and the lightness turns out to be deliberate. The ending strips away the jokes and shows what they were hiding.
Comedy can be a way of telling a serious story, as long as the story eventually reveals the cost behind the laughs.
If you’re telling a dark story with a light touch, plant the danger early and let it catch up with your characters in the end.
What makes American Made (2017) work?
I give American Made a 9, and an easy one. Cruise is at his most playful, Liman keeps it moving at a sprint, the story is so absurd it’s hard to believe it’s partly true, and the ending turns all that laughter to ash. My only complaint is that it sometimes shrugs at the damage the cocaine and the guns did, and the ending goes a long way toward paying that debt back.
Frequently Asked Questions
- February 19, 1986, Encyclopedia of Arkansas
- Today in history: November 3, NBC News
- American Made (2017), IMDb
