Based On A True Story...Not!

Rating: 6/10 (9 October 2017)

The MPAA should probably consider a "Whopper Alert" warning for audiences who attend a motion picture prefaced with the phrase "based on a true story." And the first movie to feature the designation—in big red letters—should be "American Made."
"American Made" is purportedly the true story of Barry Seal, a onetime TWA pilot who eventually became a minor peripheral player in the Iran- Contra political scandal which plagued the second term of the Ronald Reagan Administration.
The picture depicts Seal as an innocent adventurer recruited and co- opted by the CIA to fly clandestine reconnaissance missions over Central America. As Seals' value to the CIA increases, he's asked to become more deeply involved in highly illegal diplomatic interactions.
The film shows Seal becoming a courier between the US and Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, transporting weapons to Nicaraguan rebels based in Honduras and eventually building an army of Contras training at a secret base in Arkansas. It's only a matter of time before Seal is captured by Columbian drug-lord Pablo Escobar, and compelled to run shipments of cocaine from Medellin to the US.
According to "American Made," Barry Seal was the Forrest Gump of the Reagan Administration and Iran-Contra. In real life, Barry Seal was a reprobate and career criminal who was sentenced to ten years in a federal penitentiary before avoiding imprisonment by offering to become an informant against Escobar and the Medellin Cartel. The extent of the "based on a true story" designation is apparently that both the movie and the history books agree that Seal was once a pilot for TWA.
You'll never find an entertainer who works harder to please an audience than Tom Cruise. And in "American Made," Cruise as Seal is the whole show, a fun-lovin' good ol' boy, a-servin' his country "Air America"- style, and making a little money in the bargain. And it's astonishing how many audience members—and even film critics—are accepting "American Made" as a factual account of a confusing time in history.
But it just ain't so. Director Doug Liman, who also teamed with Cruise on the well-received "Edge of Tomorrow" in 2014, excuses "American Made" as "a fun lie based on a true story." And from his perspective, maybe it is.
Warner Bros. studios during the 1930s turned this sort of story into an art form, in a series of cautionary tales such as "Little Caesar," "The Public Enemy," and "Bullets or Ballots." And in each of those pictures, the message came through, loud and clear—Crime Doesn't Pay.
In "American Made," that message is mostly lost in translation. A running gag in the movie is that every time Cruise as Seal leaves home to commit another abomination in the name of Uncle Sam, as a gesture of farewell he drops his pants and bares his butt to his family.
And in the end, that's the image we're left with—Tom Cruise, his famously dazzling grin turned away from the camera, mooning the audience in the name of democracy.
That's show biz, folks!