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    Take Me To The Pilot: 'American Made' Soars

    Doug Liman's "cheerfully blistering yarn" about a pilot who flew guns and drugs for the CIA makes the most of Tom Cruise's gifts as a leading man, and Liman's directorial fondness for low-level chaos.
    by Chris Klimek Sep 28, 2017 4 minutes
    I'd Like to Fly the World Some Coke: In <em>American Made</em>, Tom Cruise plays Barry Seal, a drug- running pilot in the 1980s.

    Slickness is a virtue in American Made, a cheerfully blistering yarn starring Tom Cruise as real-life-TWA-pilot-turned-CIA-stooge-turned-cocaine-smuggler Barry Seal. Piquant and picaresque, it's essentially a hybrid of Goodfellas and Air America. Those movies — one rightly revered, the other all but forgotten — were released about a month apart from one another back in 1990, a long-ago cinematic era when either one might nevertheless have starred... Tom Cruise.

    He'd just scored an Oscar nomination playing real-life Vietnam vet-turned-antiwar activist Ron Kovic in then immediately re-upped with director Tony Scott for the NASCAR action flick . Sure, was the American film of 1990, but grossed nearly twice as much. A fewdirector Doug Liman claims the star performed all of Seal's daredevil low-altitude flying scenes himself.

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