Tom Cruise is outstanding in this brilliantly satirical black comedy

Rating: 10/10 (18 September 2017)

This movie is an absolutely hilarious black comedy, and all the funnier because we know we really shouldn't find the subject matter funny (as it involves the smuggling of tonnes of cocaine from Colombia to the US), but Tom as Barry Seal is so disarmingly roguish as the happy-go-lucky lead that I found it impossible not to forgive his crimes as a pawn in a really huge game with gigantic major players.
Barry starts the movie as a airline pilot in a mundane job which he sometimes tries to shake up (literally) to make it a little more entertaining. He is a small-time smuggler of cheap contraband, and the CIA uses knowledge of this fact to recruit him into the big time. They hire him as a CIA contractor to take reconnaissance photos of the "commies" in Nicaragua, and to pick up intel from General Noriega in Panama. This leads Pablo Escobar and his two mates to recruit Barry as a cocaine smuggler, as he is always flying between Central America and the USA with the CIA's help and can drop the drugs out of the plane without detection.
The CIA agent in charge of Barry, Monty Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson) finds out about Barry's nefarious goings on, and gets him off the hook when he gets gaoled in Colombia on condition that he run guns for the Contras who are fighting the "commies" in Nicaragua. Tom agrees, but suffice it to say that the guns don't end up where they are supposed to and the cocaine operation for Escobar and his two Colombian mates ends up getting supersized.
To get out of doing 30 years in gaol for drug trafficking, Barry ultimately does a deal with the White House (Oliver North and a senior DEA guy), but these two double-cross him and it all ends badly for Barry, except that he had a great time for eight years and made a huge amount of dough.
My only beef with this film is that, unlike in another must-see film about this same subject called "Kill the Messenger" (2014 starring Jeremy Renner) this film does not make explicit the connection between the CIAs activities in Central American in the early to mid 80s and the importation of tonnes of cocaine into the USA to finance the war against the "commies" in Nicaragua, which Congress refused to back. Rather, in this move the CIA just keeps Barry out of gaol on condition that he fly heaps of guns to the Contras (which he doesn't in fact comply with), and allow Contras to do military training on the extensive property that the CIA has obtained for him in Mena, Louisiana. (Most of these "soldiers" just want to get to the USA and couldn't care less about fighting "commies", and abscond the first chance they get).
Despite the slight bending of historical fact to appease the CIA and company (the CIA admitted in 1998 to using cocaine money to fund the Contras in a 400 page document which went unreported in the US media thanks to the absurd controversy about President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinski), this film is a very rewarding and hilarious thrill ride into high stakes espionage and drug smuggling by "the man who always delivers".