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American Made

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Rent American Made on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

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American Made 's fast-and-loose attitude with its real-life story mirrors the cavalier -- and delightfully watchable -- energy Tom Cruise gives off in the leading role.

Audience Reviews

Cast & crew.

Domhnall Gleeson

Monty "Schafer"

Sarah Wright

Jesse Plemons

Sheriff Downing

Caleb Landry Jones

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Best movies to stream at home, movie news & guides, this movie is featured in the following articles., critics reviews.

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American Made

The story of Barry Seal, an American pilot who became a drug-runner for the CIA in the 1980s in a clandestine operation that would be exposed as the Iran-Contra Affair.
Barry Seal was just an ordinary pilot who worked for TWA before he was recruited by the CIA in 1978. His work in South America eventually caught the eye of the Medellín Cartel, associated with Pablo Escobar, who needed a man with his skill set. Barry became a drug trafficker, gun smuggler and money launderer. Soon acquiring the title, 'The gringo that always delivers'. — Viir khubchandani
In 1978, the skilled and ambitious TWA pilot Barry Seal smuggles Cuban cigars to increase his income. Out of the blue, he is contacted by the CIA agent Monty Schafer, who asks him to work for the CIA photographing facilities over Central America using a state-of-art small plane. Soon Barry contacts General Noriega as a courier for the CIA and is contacted by the Medellin Cartel that wants him to transport drugs to the USA. Then Schafer asks Barry to carry weapons for the Contras in Nicaragua. Barry invites pilots that are his friends and plots routes to smuggle drugs for the cartel. The CIA closes eyes to the scheme and Barry becomes richer and richer. He uses the Arkansas town Mena to launder his money. But the DEA and the FBI are tracking him down. When the CIA shuts down the scheme, Barry is left alone and arrested by the agencies. What will happen to his family and him? — Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
1978. Barry Seal, an airline pilot, is recruited by the CIA to fly special transport missions in Central America. Initially it is a matter of information-for-supplies but ultimately he ends up being a drug transporter for Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel and supplying anti-Communist groups, including the Nicaraguan Contras, with weapons. — grantss
Knowing that he smuggles Cuban cigars into the United States as a profitable side hustle, CIA agent, Monty Schafer, recruits the daredevil TWA pilot, Barry Seal, to take aerial photographs of Sandinista bases in 1978. Before long, with Barry acting as a liaison, delivering money to General Manuel Noriega in exchange for information, Pablo Escobar 's infamous Medellín Cartel enters the picture, with its co-founders, Jorge Ochoa and Carlos Lehder, wanting to have a piece of the action. Now, Seal finds himself leading a peril-laden, cocaine-dusted triple life, and Schafer, as greedy as ever, keeps assigning increasingly dangerous tasks to his thrill-seeking go-getter, including flying guns to the Nicaraguan Contras, leading to the late 1980s Iran/Contra scandal, during the second term of the Ronald Reagan Administration. — Nick Riganas
Set in the year 1978, Barry Seal (Tom Cruise) works as a pilot for Trans World Airlines. He is married to Lucy (Sarah Wright) and has two children with her, with a third on the way. While at a bar one night, Barry is found by a man saying his name is Monty Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson). He is familiar with Barry's work as a pilot, but Schafer offers him a chance to make better money by taking on reconnaissance missions for the CIA in a smaller plane with cameras just south of the border. Schafer convinces Barry that he would be working for the good guys, but it would have to be kept completely secret, even from his own family. He then lets Barry take the plane out for a ride. As he begins his new job, Barry starts making tapes documenting his travels and exploits. He flies over countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Schafer is so impressed with the photos that Barry brings back to him, that he assigns Barry a new task of being a bag man between the CIA and General Manuel Noriega (Alberto Ospino) in Panama. On his mission, Barry meets the Medellin Cartel - Jorge Ochoa (Alejandro Edda), Carlos Lehder (Fredy Yate Escobar), and Pablo Escobar (Mauricio Mejia). They want to get their drugs into the United States, but the runway for the planes is too risky for most pilots. Barry takes his plane for a ride and almost crashes into the trees but manages to pull up and continue his flight with ease and get back to the U.S. without getting in trouble. Barry now has the trust of the cartel. However, the DEA raid one of their compounds, and Barry is arrested. Schafer finds him in his cell and tells him that his house will get raided, and Lucy will most likely be brought in for questioning and be kept overnight. When Barry gets out, he goes home and urges Lucy and the kids to pack up their things so they can move. Despite Lucy's questioning, Barry insists he cannot tell her a thing, leading her to lose trust in him. The Seals move to Mena, AR. Barry is then given the assignment to move guns for the Contras, even being allowed to own his own airport and planes for the job. His first flight to meet with the Contras ends with them robbing his stuff instead of taking his guns. Barry calls Schafer to let him know that the Contras aren't interested in the guns. On his second trip, he meets with a cartel leader to negotiate sending the guns to the cartel instead. Barry brings guns to the cartel and ships their drugs to the U.S. and the Contras while trying his hardest to avoid being detected by the law. Barry gets four other men to help him on his trips when he realizes the workload is too much for one guy to pull off. They fly separate planes on their missions. Schafer then asks Barry to bring back some of the Contras to the U.S. for the CIA's newly-established training base. Upon arrival, however, some of the men run away. As Barry's business grows, he starts to contribute to the community and provide even more for his family while also shamelessly indulging in his wealth and setting up fronts to hide all the money. Eventually, the Seals are visited by Lucy's freeloading brother JB (Caleb Landry Jones), whom Barry is not fond of. When Lucy tells JB to get a job, Barry sets him up working at the airport. JB ends up taking some money that Barry was hiding in the hangar, using it to buy himself a new car and to pick up an underage girl. The DEA starts to go after the pilots. On one mission, Barry crash-lands and loses a significant portion of the drugs. Meanwhile, the cartel runs into trouble when Escobar declares war on the government, and the cartel gets kicked out of Colombia. Barry must meet with them to sort out the issues. At the same time, JB gets arrested by the sheriff after he is caught carrying a suitcase full of money. After bailing JB out, Barry drives him to a separate car so that he can leave and never return. JB curses Barry and drives away, only to be blown up by a car bomb. Barry gets rid of the car by dumping it in the woods. Barry and Schafer meet to discuss what's been going on. Schafer says the Contras left since they just weren't fighting. The CIA then starts to get rid of anything involving Barry. Barry attempts to move the stash of products out of the airport, but he is found by FBI, DEA, and other law enforcement agents, and he is arrested. Barry meets with a prosecutor, Dana Sibota (Jayma Mays), who is hellbent on getting Barry locked up. As he waits outside while she speaks to a lawyer on the phone, Barry tries to bribe the agents with caddies while also insisting he will walk away scot-free. Sibota comes out and confirms that Barry is free to go. Barry is given a task under Ronald Reagan's administration to gather dirt on the Sandinistas, all of whom are believed to be drug traffickers. They set up cameras in a plane for Barry to get photos as proof. Barry returns to meet with Ochoa and the rest of the Medellin Cartel. As he still has their trust, Barry engages in business with them, moving products into the plane where the photos are taken. The White House later releases the photos as propaganda, and Barry is seen in the photos. He is told that they were not supposed to be released to the public until after the cartel members were caught. The DEA go through Barry's house looking for evidence. Lucy takes the kids to Baton Rouge. Barry is convicted and is sentenced to 1,000 hours of community service. He moves from hotel to hotel each night. On one such night, he is approached in his car by hit-men sent by Escobar, and he is subsequently murdered. The final text states that "Schafer" got promoted after suggesting they get the Iranians to arm the Contras. One of Barry's guys went on to become a pastor in Alabama after he was set free. The rest of the pilots weren't seen after that. The CIA continued to use Barry's plane to arm the Contras until one of the planes was shot down over Nicaragua. The ensuing scandal was known as the Iran-Contra Affair. Lucy returned to Louisiana with the kids. The last thing we see is her working as a cashier at a coffee shop, still wearing a bracelet that Barry gave her.

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Film Review: ‘American Made’

Doug Liman's brash, busy CIA pilot adventure may be based on the life of Barry Seal, but it's most importantly a Tom Cruise star showcase.

By Guy Lodge

Film Critic

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There’s a lot going on in “ American Made ,” a hectic, hyperactive true-life tall tale that jumbles Colombian drug-smuggling, CIA arms-trading, Midwestern fortune-making and a whole lot of very fancy flying. Yet the most salient image in the whole coked-up kaleidoscope is a simple one: Tom Cruise ‘s sunglasses. There may be significant stretches in Doug Liman ‘s film where the star, as TWA pilot turned all-sides-of-the-law hustler Barry Seal, isn’t wearing wire-rimmed aviator shades, yet somehow it feels as if they’re always there. An accessory that Cruise made wholly his own in “Top Gun,” they connote as much rakish bravado and slightly impenetrable machismo now as they did then — 1986, coincidentally the year that the action in “American Made,” which spans eight fast years of Carter-to-Reagan-era governmental skulduggery, comes to a startling head.

A sweat-slicked, exhausting but glibly entertaining escapade on its own terms, “American Made” is more interesting as a showcase for the dateless elasticity of Cruise’s star power. It feels, for better or worse, like a film he could have made at almost any point in the last 30 years: As Cruise’s character here puts his prodigious aviation skills to wildly irresponsible use, it’s tempting to imagine Liman’s film as an oblique spiritual follow-up to the adventures of flashy Navy pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, beating tardy forthcoming sequel “Top Gun: Maverick” to the punch. The films’ worlds might be very different, not least since “American Made” counts as fast-and-loose non-fiction, but Cruise’s presence across them, all Colgate grin and cock-of-the-walk swagger, is notably consistent. (Even period authenticity has no dominion over him: While his co-stars are slathered in late-1970s and ’80s kitsch, Cruise’s hair and costuming throughout can scarcely be linked to any milieu.)

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It’s frankly a relief to see Cruise acting this assertively himself again (give or take a mild Louisiana drawl) after watching his leading-man persona anonymously shoehorned into the established franchise constraints of “The Mummy” earlier this summer. What the actual Barry Seal may have been like is almost impossible to glean from his performance; this is a star vehicle first and foremost, which makes the film’s balancing of fact and fancy even harder to parse. Gary Spinelli’s script follows in the recent tradition of “War Dogs,” “Gold” and “American Hustle” — all high-flown, fact-based tangles of individual and institutional corruption — by blatantly owning up to the absurdity of its real-life premise. “Shit gets really crazy from here,” Seal even admits in one of several grainy, after-the-fact camcorder confessionals, a somewhat clunky framing device the film uses in lieu of voiceover.

Things are already pretty chaotic to begin with, as the film opens with a standard-issue disco-era swirl of archive footage (including, cutely, a vintage Universal Pictures logo at the outset) and jaunty airborne antics. All set to Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” — kicking off a peppy jukebox soundtrack that later reaches its on-the-nose thematic apotheosis with Talking Heads’ “Slippery People” — this intro swiftly establishes Seal as a devil-may-care playboy in TWA uniform. The year is 1978 and Seal is bored of his domestic flight path, keeping himself amused with the odd bit of cigar smuggling and faked inflight turbulence. When he’s approached by CIA man Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson, laying on the alpha smarm) to fly undercover for them instead, skimming Central America to take surveillance photos, he’s only too quick to accept.

If Seal’s wife Lucy (Sarah Wright Olsen) and two children back in Baton Rouge are secondary considerations to him, the film treats them likewise: Doing her best with scant material from the script and wardrobe department alike, Wright Olsen is mostly limited to fretful chiding on the sidelines as her husband’s covert career veers off course. Which it does, in rapidly escalating but dizzyingly lucrative fashion: An illicit sideline in transporting cocaine from Colombia for the Medellín Cartel is soon co-opted by the CIA into a major gun-running racket, while Seal’s new home base in back-of-beyond Arkansas becomes a military training ground for the Contras.

To go by the film’s account, Seal simply winked and smiled his way into becoming a critical player in the Iran-Contra affair of the mid-1980s, and his blithe detachment from the political specifics of the scandal (he admits to an affection for Ronald Reagan, but principally on the basis of “Bedtime for Bonzo”) brings to mind a smoother-operating Forrest Gump. As major figures like Pablo Escobar and Manuel Noriega flit through the film in incidental cameos, Seal remains the mostly charmed, accidental center of it all.

Fusing the lickety-split comedy of his “Swingers” days with the more businesslike action smarts of his latter-day Hollywood works, Liman does his best to keep this top-heavy narrative in constant motion — without approaching the technical or structural inventiveness of his previous Cruise collaboration, 2014’s undervalued sci-fi mindbender “Edge of Tomorrow.” Enlisting “City of God” cinematographer César Charlone proves a canny move, as the Uruguayan’s roving, agitated camera style (not to mention a perspiring, overripe palette, heavy on hot yellows) implies antsy tension even in comparatively banal domestic scenes.

As storytelling, however, “American Made” is both so distracted and so distracting that there’s barely time to consider what it all adds up to. Beneath Cruise’s unruffled commandeering lies a messy array of secondary characters somewhat haphazardly chopped into proceedings by editor Andrew Mondshein. (Dylan Tichenor and Saar Klein are credited with additional cutting.) From Seal’s redneck brother-in-law (a typically slithering Caleb Landry Jones) to a suspicious local sheriff (Jesse Plemons, who seems to have suffered most in the edit), such figures add little color or credibility to the film’s comic-book reportage.

In the film’s press materials, Spinelli admits to being in thrall to Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas,” and the influence is particularly clear in a headlong final act that deals with the souring of Seal’s questionably achieved American dream. But “American Made” lacks the sense of moral reckoning and self-effacing human irony it needs to achieve the emotional payoff or tragicomic heft of “American Hustle,” let alone Scorsese’s masterwork. Based on a true story or otherwise, it winds up simply as another sharp, spit-shined Tom Cruise jet, and not a bad one at that: The genius of Cruise’s superstardom may be that he can make even the scuzziest American scoundrel seem, like Ethan Hunt or Maverick Mitchell, untouchably heroic. When those aviators are on, all bets are off.

Reviewed at Universal Pictures screening room, London, Aug. 16, 2017. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 114 MIN.

Production: A Universal Pictures, Cross Creek Pictures presentation in association with Imagine Entertainment of a Brian Grazer production in association with Quadrant Pictures, Vendian Entertainment, Hercules Film Fund. Producers: Doug Davison, Brian Grazer, Brian Oliver, Tyler Thompson, Kim Roth, Ray Angelic. Executive producers: Michael Bassick, Terry Dougas, Michael Finley, Paris Latsis, Brandt Andersen, Eric Greenfeld, Ray Chen.
Crew: Director: Doug Liman. Screenplay: Gary Spinelli. Camera (color): César Charlone. Editor: Andrew Mondshein. Music: Christophe Beck.
With: Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson, Sarah Wright Olsen, Alejandro Edda, Caleb Landry Jones, Jayma Mays, Jesse Plemons, Lola Kirke.

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