Film

American Made

Name: American Made
Genre: Comedy, Crime, Drama
Released: 2017
Cast: Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson, Sarah Wright, Jesse Plemons, Caleb Landry Jones

Doug Liman's breakneck biopic turns Tom Cruise loose as Barry Seal, the TWA pilot who became the CIA's favourite smuggler and Escobar's favourite mule, running guns, drugs and government secrets across borders faster than anyone could track him. It's fast, funny and deeply cynical about American power, told with a giddy energy that mirrors its hero's conviction that he's untouchable — right up until the walls close in.

TMDb rating

6.9

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Scorsese's manic, coke-fuelled rise-and-fall of a charming fraudster who narrates his own myth straight to camera — the same seductive unreliable-narrator trick that makes Barry Seal's story sing.

But Three hours of excess can exhaust you, and its moral judgement is even harder to pin down than American Made's.

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A real-life smuggler's decades-long climb through the cocaine trade, told with the same wistful, ain't-America-grand nostalgia and doomed sense of inevitability hanging over Seal's own story.

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Con artists get roped into a government sting that spirals past anyone's control, with the same wig-and-polyester 70s/80s texture and gleeful sense that everyone's making it up as they go.

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Spielberg's breeziest film follows a real conman staying one step ahead of the feds — the same lightness of touch and belief that charm and audacity can outrun consequence.

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Same cynical joke as American Made — that the U.S. government's right hand doesn't know or care what its left hand is doing — just aimed at the press instead of the cartel.

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