America is the worst country in the world

Rating: 6/10 (16 October 2017)

For a moment I thought we might be in for some biting political commentary, like Brad Pitt's 'War Machine' which delivered exactly that with a real healthy does of realism which I was hoping it might be a new trend from Hollywood but no, sadly it was the opposite of that. The moral imperative appears to be that it's OK to break any law you want if 1) it makes you rich and 2) especially if you're doing it for the 'Merican military. We just love money, you benefit, your family benefits (always good, you can do ANYTHING for your family in Hollywood) and in this case, the local community benefits as well, especially the banks. And that's all that matters. There is no admission that the social consequences of these crimes are really, really odious and those agencies that Merica does have that are suppose to enforce 'law and order' are easily overridden for the sake of political expediency. Justice is clearly defeated. Those agencies are also portrayed as 'stuffed shirt', the well dressed female prosecutor spends time adjusting her skirt before she speaks... It might have been a very different movie if Ron Howard had directed it, but alas, he didn't. So instead of taking the opportunity to highlight US government corruption (which continues unabated today - see War Machine) - we celebrate self interest and invoke rock music, 'caddies' and some good old fashioned Southern slime. We are left with the impression that it's only those foreign agent drug cartels that are bad. They spoilt everything, except the ending. They couldn't do anything about the ending other than take the blame for it. How convenient. Having said that, obviously I was expecting too much of Cruise, but he does deliver a great performance, youthful, energetic, ebullient, just what the role needed. Gleeson too, passes himself off as young, relatively inexperienced operative learning to negotiate the waves of success and failure at the CIA - but at least the movie, however fleetingly, did expose the wholesale brutality and coercion that the CIA really does inflict on people to make them follow orders, without which they would have no 'ASSETS'...