It’s no secret we have a soft spot for Tom Cruise at the Two Reel Cinema Club. But somehow I’d never seen American Made (2017), Doug Liman’s drug-running-small-plane picture, until this week.
Imagine you really loved the final 45 minutes of Goodfellas, loved it so much you wanted to turn it into a whole feature film. And you also loved planes. Well that’s American Made. Tom Cruise is Barry Seal, a TWA pilot who becomes a smuggler bringing drugs to the US and guns to Nicaragua until he gets in over his head.
It’s entertaining, I cannot deny it, although the exuberant editing and 80s-video-footage-intercuts get a little wearing after a while. Great soundtrack, too.
But what makes the film stand out is that Tom Cruise plays the central character as an idiot. Barry the risk-taking pilot and all around action man is really very stupid. He’s aways making bad decisions, misreading the room and getting it wrong. He agrees to take off from the cartel’s way-too-short runway and ends up crashing into a tree, only making it airborne through dumb luck. He digs a hole to hide a huge bag of cash only to find he’s already buried a bag of cash in that same patch of ground. And the film revels in his idiocy, serving us shots of Tom’s uncomprehending face so close up that you can almost hear the sound of gears clicking into place, or failing to mesh and coming apart. He is a Beavis and Butthead grade of moron but with a pilot’s license, and it’s great fun to see the normally cool, resourceful and hyper-competent Cruise play a dunce.
But… now that I’ve watched Tom play against type, I’ve come to realise that a lot of Tom Cruise’s characters are idiots. I mean a LOT.
Maverick? Cocky and an excellent pilot, yes, but also an idiot. Just look at his face when Penny’s daughter catches him sneaking out of her mother’s bedroom in Top Gun: Maverick.
Risky Business? Kid starts a brothel in his parents’ house and loses control over the situation. What an idiot.
Magnolia? Tom plays Frank, the motivational speaker and pick up artist, and that guy’s clearly an idiot.
War of the Worlds? Tom can’t even make a sandwich properly. What does that make him?
If you’ve seen Tropic Thunder you’ll know that Cruise is a very skilful comic actor. But it’s a surprise to discover that he’s been doing comic roles for years and years and I never noticed. (Maybe that makes me the idiot in this case…)