Why American Made gave Tom Cruise one of the more unusual roles of his career starts with the fact that not every Tom Cruise movie becomes a huge hit.
With a career filled with movies like Top Gun, Mission: Impossible and A Few Good Men, it can almost feel unusual when one of his films comes and goes without becoming a major event.
That was pretty much the case with American Made.
The 2017 movie didn’t set the domestic box office on fire, although it did receive generally strong reviews and gave Cruise something a little different to play. Instead of saving the world or taking down an international villain, he was playing Barry Seal, a pilot who somehow found himself in the middle of a story involving the CIA, drug smugglers and the Medellín Cartel.
And yes, a lot of it really happened. That was one of the things Cruise found so interesting about the movie in the first place.
American Made gave Tom Cruise one wild true story
Seal started out as an airline pilot, which sounds pretty normal. It didn’t stay normal for very long.
His flying skills eventually took him into a world that included covert missions and drug smuggling, and his life became more complicated and more dangerous with just about every step.
It’s the kind of story that could easily sound made up if somebody told it to you without mentioning Seal was a real person. That also gave Cruise plenty to work with.
Barry isn’t Ethan Hunt. He’s certainly not Maverick, either. He’s a guy who keeps seeing another opportunity and deciding to take it, even when common sense probably should have told him to head in the opposite direction.
Cruise’s natural movie-star charm works particularly well here because Barry needs plenty of it.
Doug Liman reunited with Cruise
American Made also brought Cruise back together with director Doug Liman after the two worked on Edge of Tomorrow.
The movies couldn’t be much more different. Edge of Tomorrow threw Cruise into a science-fiction war involving aliens and a time loop. American Made put him behind the controls of an airplane and dropped him into an increasingly strange chapter of American history.
Liman keeps things moving, and the movie never feels like it’s trying to give viewers a history lesson. That’s probably for the best.
There is already enough going on in Seal’s life without slowing everything down to explain every last detail.
Tom Cruise believed the story was the real attraction
Of course, having Cruise in the movie didn’t hurt when it came to getting people’s attention. His name has been selling movie tickets for decades.
But Cruise didn’t look at American Made as a movie people would watch simply because he happened to be starring in it. For him, Seal and the strange path his life took were what made the movie worth telling.
Click on the video below to hear Tom Cruise talk about why he thought audiences would respond to the story of American Made.
The movie may not have been one of Cruise’s biggest theatrical successes, but that’s hardly the end of a movie’s life anymore.
Streaming, digital platforms and home video have given American Made plenty of chances to be discovered by viewers who skipped it the first time around. And once you know what Barry Seal got himself mixed up in, it’s pretty hard not to be curious.
American Made is currently streaming on HBO Max and is also available on DVD, Blu-ray, 4K and most digital platforms.
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