American Made

Many laughs are earned in observing how much money Seal actually made and how much the government played him for a fool. And like many cautionary tales, some of the comedy hurts. Liman and Cruise know this, and the result is something well-crafted, if woefully familiar.

2536d ago

It’s 1978, and Barry Seal (Tom Cruise), a bored TWA pilot with a sideline in contraband concealment, gets hired by the CIA to take reconnaissance photos of Soviet-backed insurgents in South America. Before long he’s drug smuggling for all manner of undesirables, having the time of his life risking death.

2536d ago

Tom Cruise flies high in the darkly funny, but derivative crime saga American Made.

2536d ago

Tom Cruise is actually good in ‘American Made’

2536d ago

There’s no shortage of “Goodfellas” wannabes out there, but “American Made” is a serviceably entertaining one with consistent action and hearty chuckles along the way.

2536d ago

Tom Cruise is just terrific in this morality tale of 'American Made' greed.

2536d ago

Doug Liman's brash, busy CIA pilot adventure may be based on the life of Barry Seal, but it's most importantly a Tom Cruise star showcase.

2536d ago

Doug Liman’s yarn about drug running and C.I.A. intrigue, starring Tom Cruise, and Stephen Frears’s Queen Victoria bio-pic, starring Judi Dench.

2536d ago

Liman knows how to keep the convoluted, almost impossibly far-fetched story on the rails, without losing our attention, and he adds many details that will bring a smile.

2536d ago

It’s fairly entertaining even when it doesn’t quite work, directed for maximum pace by Cruise’s “Edge of Tomorrow” cohort, director Doug Liman.

2536d ago

Star does everything he can to liven up this stranger-than-fiction story about a pilot who becomes a C.I.A.-backed drug smuggler.

2536d ago

Tom Cruise stars as the pilot who shuttled contraband for both the CIA and the Medellín Cartel.

2536d ago

Mr. Cruise’s brisk, ingratiating performance — all smiles, hard-charging physicality and beads of sweat — does a lot to soften the edges. But Mr. Liman doesn’t press Mr. Cruise to dig into the character, and the actor mostly hurdles forward in a movie that never gets around to asking what makes Barry run and why.

2536d ago

A grinning Cruise is back in Top Gun territory in Doug Liman’s sort-of-true story about a bored pilot who starts working for a Colombian cartel and the CIA.

2536d ago

Cruise, still effortlessly oozing charm after all these years, makes Seal into something of a naive chump.

2536d ago

Tom Cruise and Doug Liman reteam for this dark comedy-thriller about pilot Barry Seal, who worked for both the CIA and the Colombian cartel in the 1980s.

2536d ago

Madcap real-life tale can't escape the albatross that is Tom Cruise.

2536d ago

Following The Mummy, American Made is easily the best Tom Cruise film of 2017, though it never strikes quite the right tone for the story it's trying to tell.

2536d ago

Director Doug Liman flirts with scuzziness and political satire but shies away from the darkness.

2536d ago

Doug Liman's American Made largely eschews any sense of verisimilitude in favor of wacky comedy bits.

2536d ago

The makers of the based-on-a-true-story black comedy "American Made" fail to satisfactorily answer one pressing question: why is CIA operative and Colombia drug-runner Barry Seal's story being told as a movie and not a book? What's being shown in this film that couldn't also be expressed in prose?

2536d ago

Cruise plays Barry as an aw-shucks raconteur, and the routine is amusing at first. But midway through American Made, even Cruise devotees might decide enough is enough.

2536d ago