‘American Made’ operates on full Cruise wattage

It was announced earlier this year that Tom Cruise is working on a sequel to “Top Gun,” which seems a almost as ill-advised as his “Mummy” reboot earlier this summer. Now that “American Made” has been released, it almost makes the idea obsolete. If you set aside the fact that the film was based on a real-life tale of a commercial pilot who runs guns and narcotics for the CIA in the 1970s and ‘80s, this could easily pass for one of the most satisfying continuations of Maverick’s tale that could have ever been conceived. 

Cruise takes the name Barry Seal, but he is operating on full Cruise wattage here, playing a confident, bored pilot who resorts to various midair pranks on passengers to keep his job from getting stale. He is one day approached by a CIA operative (played by Domhnall Gleeson) to buzz on down to Central America to take reconnaissance pics of various nefarious activities. 

His skills provide a worthy service to the government, and Seal soon finds his job duties expanding to hauling bags of cash in exchange for information on mutual enemies, coughed up by one Manuel Noriega. He also manages to grab the attention of a rising Panamanian drug cartel led by one Pablo Escobar, who hires Seal to take cocaine back to the U.S. and drop it into the swamps of Baton Rouge. 

As one would presume, things begin to escalate and get complicated, which prompts Seal to round up his family in the middle of the night and hightail it to Arkansas to take off some of the encroaching heat. Meanwhile, Seal finds himself with more money than he can stuff in his home and begins to simply bury it in his backyard while he struggles to keep all aspects of his life afloat. 

Cruise reteams with his “Edge of Tomorrow” director Doug Liman (and if you have not seen that film, please do yourself a favor and give it your attention, as it is one of most entertaining sci-fi films of the last decade), and the same chemistry they exhibited in the 2014 flick in on full display here. It’s also quite easy to envision Cruise’s performance as a decades-later follow-up on the adult exploits of Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell after leaving the Navy and settling into real life. 

For starters, Cruise looks nothing like the actual Barry Seal on whom this story is loosely based, and secondly, he exudes the same cocksure swagger he brought to “Top Gun,” and it’s easy to see how “Maverick” could, after all these years, still have a “need for speed.” Or cocaine … or opiates … or whatever drug of choice is stashed in the cargo.

Cruise is always at his best when he’s playing someone who is a bit of a misanthrope. Look at his turns in as a slimy hustler in “Rain Man,” a self-help guru in “Magnolia,” or his heart-of-stone hitman in “Collateral,” in which he is able to extract the slightest bit of humanity from roles that may seem void of any sympathetic qualities. 

And the role of selfish, opportunistic pilot Seal falls right into that category (it also echoes the same morally ambiguous leads of many of Scorsese’s films, such as “Goodfellas” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.”). And with Liman at the helm, the two are able to keep the action charging forward at a healthy clip, breaking only for flashes of humor, horror and that megawatt grin that reminds us why Cruise is still a star.