American Made (2017)

Director: Doug Liman

Writer: Gary Spinelli

Composer: Christopher Beck

Starring: Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson, Sarah Wright, Jesse Plemons, Caleb Landry Jones, Lola Kirke, Jayma Mays, Alejandro Edda

More info: IMDb

Tagline: The sky is never the limit.

Plot: The story of Barry Seal, an American pilot who became a drug-runner for the CIA in the 1980s in a clandestine operation that would be exposed as the Iran-Contra Affair.

My rating: 7/10

Will I watch it again?  No.

I've heard that they use movie magic to keep Tom Cruise looking younger than his years and I'm starting to believe it.  Cruise does a fine job in this picture.  He's fun.   I dug the flick and there are a few moments of "will he make it?" and "how the hell is this going to turn out?" but the film misses the boat by not building a compelling story so that the climax has more weight.  Don't misunderstand.  There are a lot of very good scenes and it is an enjoyable movie but it never felt like like momentum was building in the sense we were being taken on a journey that will end with an emotional punch.  Instead, we're just hanging out with Sears (Cruise) on some of his little adventures.  That alone is good enough but I'm not sure what the filmmakers were going for if they wanted the audience to have that emotional connection. Regardless, it's a good film.  When I got home from the theater I checked out Barry Seal's Wikipedia page and it looks like the film is loosely based on Seals but shares little of what happened, at least as far as the big picture is concerned.