‘American Made’ review: Tom Cruise action film mostly works

Doug Liman’s “American Made” is based on the real-life figure of Barry Seal, a TWA pilot who during the 1980s smuggled cocaine for the Medellin Cartel and found himself swept up in the Iran-Contra scandal. Starring Tom Cruise as the freewheeling, fast-living Seal, “American Made” presents itself as a roller-coaster ride through a coke-fueled decade, and for the most part it works. The movie jumps the tracks, however, by over-mythologizing its anti-hero and turning him into the poster boy for Reagan-era hypocrisy and hubris.

The story begins, tantalizingly, with a clever young CIA agent, Monty Schafer (an excellent Domhnall Gleeson), who offers to overlook Seal’s occasional smuggled Cuban cigar if he’ll agree to fly reconnaissance missions over Latin American trouble spots. Seal barely stops to wonder why him; he’s so bored with his autopilot job that he jumps at the chance. “And that,” he tells us in a brassy Louisiana accent, “was the day I joined the CIA.”

What follows is a labyrinthine tale of side gigs, double-crosses, vast riches and government cover-ups. Seal’s missions soon expand to running guns, then importing actual Contras to train on U.S. soil. Seal also unwisely begins smuggling cocaine. Eventually, the massive influx of cash into Seal’s home base — a little town called Mena, Arkansas — draws the attention of nearly every three-letter federal agency in existence.

Cruise doesn’t seem fully suited to the role of lovable reprobate, but he knows how to capture an adrenaline rush and his charisma is, as ever, undimmed. Liman directs with plenty of pizzazz, though some thoughtful moments would have been nice as well.

The main problem with “American Made” is that its story doesn’t support its theme. There’s little if any evidence that Seal worked for the CIA; Schafer appears to be a complete fiction; and much of Seal’s story, from his secret meeting with Iran-Contra architect Oliver North to his casual run-in with what looks like a young George W. Bush, is simply hard to swallow. “American Made” wants to cast Seal as capitalist caricature and political pawn all at once, but that’s a lot to hang on this particular pilot’s wings.