A Cinema of Swagger

Director Doug Liman is good for Tom Cruise. Hollywood's quintessential movie star has had a rough go of it lately. The Mummy was a dud, and last year's Jack Reacher: Never Go Back suffered for Cruise's alleged control freakiness. His last truly great movie - Cruise doesn't make "films" - was Edge of Tomorrow, the criminally underrated time travel adventure in which Emily Blunt shot him 46 times. It was so great, in fact, Cruise is teaming up with Liman for his next two outings.

Liman has proved adept at harnessing Cruise's innate keenness and gung-ho American arrogance that can grate when it's rendered in the wrong character. Real life drug trafficker and government informant Barry Seal, however, is the right character, and American Made is the right movie. Seal is a pilot slogging away for TWA in the late 1970s when shady CIA bureaucrat Monty Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson, Brooklyn) tempts him with an adrenaline kick of a job: flying a slick private jet over the jungles of Central America collecting intelligence. The thrill seeker in him says yes, and that leads Seal right to the burgeoning Medellin Cartel and Jorge Ochoa (Alejandro Edda, charming) and Pablo Escobar (Mauricio Meja, menacing). Boggling wealth, excitement, car bombs, and angry federal agencies soon follow, in a biopic hybrid of The Wolf of Wall Street and Top Gun.

Anyone looking for an insightful deconstruction of the connection between American drug policy in Central and South America and the crack cocaine epidemic that decimated black communities at home should look elsewhere. Consequences aren't on Liman or writer Gary Spinelli's mind. American Made is a snappy entertainment, a comedy-drama whose comedy draws from its fundamental lunacy, and its drama from the sad fact of its veracity. Cameos by '80s touchstones (Oliver North, Manuel Noriega, George HW Bush!) are wrapped in a gauzy, VHS-era aesthetic that does a spectacularly efficient job of setting up time and place. Cruise is the lynchpin, selling the whole thing with an effortless swagger and hubris that makes the film better than it has a right to be.

Swagger is where Edgar Wright fails in Baby Driver, a fetishized crime caper that's so enamored with its own cleverness it abandons narrative half way through to bask in its own glow. The Fault in Our Stars' Ansel Elgort plays Baby, a tinnitus-suffering wheelman working for Atlanta crime boss Doc (Kevin Spacey, hammy), who's roped into One Last Job (of course). Essentially a jukebox musical heist flick (the kitschy-cool soundtrack runs the gamut from Jon Spencer Blues Explosion to Golden Earring), Baby Driver indeed is dotted with meticulously crafted chases, but needlessly complicated robberies and overly contrived dialogue serve as plot and character arcs that are designed simply to take us from one chase to the next. Baby and Doc are joined in their larceny by a series of underwritten, more interesting thieves, including Buddy (Jon Hamm, in a wonderfully greasy departure from Don Draper) and the foul-mouthed, trigger-happy Bats (Jamie Foxx), who doubts Baby's crazy driving skills.

Wright has been a self-consciously ironic genre darling since he broke out with the Three Flavours Cornetto with regular collaborators Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. When Marvel Studios tapped him to direct Ant-Man, expectations were sky high, and to this day, fanboys/girls everywhere lament what might have been had he not dropped out of that production. It's easy to guess now: it would have been lazy and self-satisfied. Setting aside Wright's lack of a grasp on place (this is the whitest Atlanta you'll ever see), there's a vivid "Look at me!" tone that comes across more hyperactive child that assured filmmaker. And Elgort turns in a series of moderated scowls more than a performance, and makes you pine for Ryan Gosling's getaway man in Drive. Now that was swagger.

(HK Edition 09/08/2017 page10)