"He knew what he signed up for."

Rating: 8/10 (20 October 2017)

Do we ever fully comprehend how stupid or incompetent our own government can be?
Doug Liman, Tom Cruise, and company do Barry Seal justice in this movie.
Tom Cruise does a lot of actual flying in this. Good for him. Nice to see.
While it might be the most important Hollywood film of 2017, American Made is not perfect.
First off, the wife character is not fleshed out enough. She seems just ancillary and undeveloped compared to the equivalent role in Wolf of Wall Street. Was there more left on the cutting room floor because it wasn't any good or was it just written this way? I can't say one way or the other if this actress had the chops to pull off an expanded part, but there's a disappointing lack of much attempt to give us more meat here.
This version of Seal has more of the CIA stuff in it than the Hopper film that not only left most of that out but attempted to make the DEA look blameless to over-the-top & embarrassing levels. American Made fibs a bit on how Seal left TWA, still doesn't go back far enough on Seal's actual agency connections, distorts the sequence of events of how Seal got into drug trafficking, and then fibs again at the end on the exact sequence of events when the Reagan administration outed him during their attempts to convince Congress to fund the Contras.
Seal was far more connected to the agency and for much longer than the Hopper film shows, with the DEA affiliation occurring later to keep him out of jail that the Hopper film does show. However, he was not conned into drug running due to his connections to the agency and he had a much longer history with both the agency and drugs than American Made portrays. The two, drugs and covert ops, simply went hand-in-hand and had been occurring for some time along with the gunrunning on their behalf. At least as far back as Vietnam, with some indications Seal was involved with the Bay of Pigs. The administration did indeed put his life in jeopardy, though it was not in such a visual manner as in this film.
I will also add that there are many further allegations not covered in this movie of the Clintons' complicity in CIA operations through Arkansas that explain some of Hillary Clinton's later bizarre agenda of continuing to promote revolutions around the world during the 2016 campaign, not to mention various other questionable deeds that have been revealed through Wikileaks.
There are also some odd connections between Obama's family and the agency, as well, which might explain some of the backlash against Trump from the intelligence community for him being an un-vetted, unconnected outsider with no prior affiliation or loyalty to them. You'd just had Reagan, Bush senior (former DCI), Bill Clinton, Bush Jr (who is portrayed here by the perfectly-cast Connor Trinneer), and now Obama in a row. Couldn't have been easy for the community to stomach. You don't need a conspiracy to have aligned interests, past connections, and sharp elbows resulting in new friction.
Oh, you might also want to go back and watch Blow after this. Carlos Lehder was helping the CIA out, too, and probably knew Seal was already CIA from the beginning of Seal's involvement with the Medellin cartel. It starts to explain why the cartel was so trustful of Seal even with his legal troubles and then went out of their way to try and involve the Sandinistas in drug smuggling if you have Lehder pushing for it and Seal there to help. Lehder is now in "protective custody" in the US federal prison system under an assumed identity.
Will the USA ever get the equivalent of Truth and Reconciliation as those supposedly inferior nations around the world have been achieving as they surpass us in justice and honesty? Probably not, but we get a small taste of it at least in our arts like here in American Made.