Tom Cruise shines in dark comedy American Made

Tom Cruise as Barry Seal in American Made. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

American Made’s Barry Seal (as played by Tom Cruise) embodies the dark side of the American Dream. He is the embodiment of what America can offer to visionaries and dreamers, a life of wealth and fame thanks to hard work, ingenuity, and an otherworldly amount of ambition. It’s the method of attaining those dreams that matters, and it’s the driving force behind director Doug Liman’s pretty excellent dark comedy.

American Made is one of those movies that sports the “based on a true story” slogan, which usually means minor amounts of truth overwhelmed by numerous exaggerations and flat out lies. And this movie is guilty as sin in stretching the truth, with the lies making Barry Seal appear less awful than the real-life counterpart in the early parts of the movie. But even the fantastical aspects don’t mask the truth of what happened completely, as the story itself is pretty close to the insanity depicted in this film. The movie's version of Seal’s life starts with the man as a TWA pilot recruited by the CIA (Domhnall Gleeson plays the mysterious CIA agent who recruits him) to spy on Communist fighters in Latin America in the late '70s. It snowballs into a connection with the Medellin Cartel led Pablo Escobar (Mauricio Mejia), Jorge Ochoa (Alejandro Edda), and Carlos Ledher (Fredy Yate Escobar), and the trafficking of drugs and guns in the early to mid '80s between the US, Colombia, Nicaragua, and Panama. Seal earns an almost impossible amount of money for his effort, enough for his wife Lucy (Sarah Wright) and his family can live a lavish life in the boonies of Arkansas, at least until everything inevitably falls apart.

The truth is somewhere in there – Seal definitely had connections with the Medellin Cartel and worked for the DEA – although Liman and writer Gary Spinelli care less about the man and more about how easy it is for a man’s drive to achieve the American Dream can lead him into an impossible situation. The American Dream is connected with exceptionalism, and Seal is an exceptional risk taker and charmer, willing to put passengers in danger to reduce the boredom he suffers as a commercial airline pilot. His desire for a more interesting life puts him into what turns out to be an untenable situation, stuck in the middle of a war between the US government and violent drug runners. Any side he picks is the wrong one; siding with the cartel means he has to evade government officials, while spying for the government makes him a target for Escobar and company. An average man wouldn't end up in that situation; it takes a person with a certain type of genius – the word used most often to describe Seal in American Made – to get stuck that deep into a quagmire.

American Made wouldn't succeed as it does without the dramatic and comedic efforts of Cruise. Although he is a few years too old for the part – to the point that Cruise could be Wright's father – Cruise excels at providing the charisma, charm, and moderate insanity required to sell himself to so many different sides. This is an old school movie star role that requires wattage and the right type of smirk or smile to keep the audience a little far away from thoughts about how truly terrible of a person Seal is. Cruise turns a criminal into a beguiling scoundrel and wins viewers over despite his actions.

That turn in character reflects the surprisingly light tone Spinelli and Liman implement for a movie with this subject matter. Even amid some brutal murders and moments of uncomfortable intensity, American Made finds the humor in the horror and plays it to the hilt. Sequences that could easily be shown as dark are instead mined for a few jokes or an pretty good sight gag involving an impressive amount of cocaine. At least until the end, in which the actual repercussions of Seal's actions come to fruition and the movie pauses for a moment to let the actual horrors sink in. The idea of the American Dream never covers the consequences of unchecked aspirations, making the logical but still shocking ending to this movie more powerful than expected.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 115 minutes

Genre: Biographical

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Target audience: Tom Cruise fans and folks who are interested in the cocaine trade.

Take the whole family?: This is an R movie for several justifiable reasons, so just make it a date night.

Theater or Netflix?: It's good enough to deserve a cinema visit.

Academy Awards odds?: I don't think the movie will get that much, but I can see Tom Cruise getting a nomination for Best Actor. This is the best performance Cruise has offered in a long while – a cliché that does apply in this case – and without him this movie wouldn’t be as good as it is.

Watch this as well?: The 2001 movie Blow, featuring Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz, a real-life adaptation of another American connected with Pablo Escobar, is pretty interesting and has a strong performance by Depp as George Jung.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle bogged down by length, aimless plot

Taron Egerton in Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Image courtesy 20th Century Fox.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle gets off to about as brilliant of a start as a sequel can. Within two minutes the movie reestablishes its protagonist (Taron Egerton's spy Eggsy/Galahad), introduces his main rival (Edward Holcroft as Charlie), and launches into an entertaining car fight sequence scored by Prince's Let's Go Crazy. The sequence works marvelously, a fun and exciting way of getting the audience involved immediately into the action, a testament to efficient and effective writing can do, aided greatly by director Matthew Vaughn's eye for a well executed fight scene.The movie is sprinkled with some quality action sequences; none quite as insane and addicting as the brutal battle royale Colin Firth engaged in at the church in the first Kingsman, but there remain a bevy of unique, well executed and crowd pleasing fights to appease the audience's desire. If it could have kept that pace, The Golden Circle would be a hell of an action movie with some fun spy elements in between.

Yet the movie can't sustain the pace it set in the opener. Even after literally blowing up the eponymous organization (save Mark Strong's Merlin) and introducing some Kentucky equivalents (Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, Pedro Pascal and Jeff Bridges), The Golden Circle loses itself to unwanted plot machinations that ultimately go nowhere and provide no incentive for the viewers to stick around. It's the downside to having what could be an action movie with a run time of nearly two and a half hours, as the audience is stuck wading through the some awkward sequences spliced together to resemble a plot, taking its sweet time to get to the fireworks factory. And what makes for a plot is not worth getting invested in, focusing on a crazed drug lord (admittedly a rather fun Julianne Moore) poisoning millions of people to legalize recreational drug use. Her wish is to leave her jungle fortress and move back to America a very, very wealthy woman, which is a less than captivating villainous motivation. She's vicious through the process, forcing henchmen to murder each other and threatening Elton John (a highlight) with (poorly rendered) robot dogs, but the reasons for her madness lack punch and interest, especially for a genre in which evil intentions are the key to so much success.

Somewhere within The Golden Circle, Vaughn and co-writer Jane Goldman have a point for what they're trying to say about legalizing drugs. It is in there, between Moore's dreams of returning home and the counterpoint of allowing millions of drug users to die for their sins, about some sort of middle ground between the two? Whatever that sweet spot between abandoning social mores for profit and allowing for the slaughter of millions of people, Vaughn and Goldman take aim for it. That they don't know exactly what they're targeting, or the reason why that point may be of value, isn't exactly a surprise in a movie that otherwise doesn't regard nuance as an important ingredient. (To be fair, lacking nuance not a knock against the film, just a state of being for the franchise.)

What's more frustrating is the return of Firth as Harry/the original Galahad. While having Firth around is always a pleasure, but his appearance in this movie undercuts one of the key emotional scenes in the first film, in which he gets shot in the face by Samuel L. Jackson and (supposedly) dies. How he survived between The Secret Service and The Golden Circle is asinine and a screenwriting cheat, enough to frustrate viewers into questioning whether or not any death in this movie's universe truly matters. It wouldn't be surprising if more characters killed in this movie wind up being not dead in the third installment for reasons. If there's nothing truly at stake, if characters can just show up again after death, than any emotional scenes lose their desired resonance.

The give and take with The Golden Circle is the blend of solid action sequences (and general charms of Firth, Strong and Moore) countered by the egregiously long run time and poor plot. Viewers have to sift through a lot of content to get to the parts where Vaughn shines, and the number of those moments are fewer and of a greater distance than they should be. When it's at its best, The Golden Circle provides enough of what viewers want in an action movie to maintain viewer excitement and showcase Vaughn’s chops as an action director. More often than not though the movie never reaches that benchmark.

Review: Two and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 141 minutes

Genre: Action

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Target audience: Fans of the first movie and folks down for some charming British violence.

Take the whole family?: Yeah… this one gets a little bloody and gory. Keep the kids away.

Theater or Netflix?: Not much to see for a theater trip.

How involved is Channing Tatum in this movie?: Not as much as hoped. After popping by for a pretty fun fight scene at the start of the second act, Tatum spends much of the movie on ice. It's pretty disappointing considering how much fun the movie could be with him added to the fray; without him, things just aren't quite as interesting as they should be.

Watch this instead?: Watching the brilliant church scene from the first movie on YouTube is worth it. For media with a little more length, revisit the James Bond classic Goldfinger.

It misses the mark for horror

Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise in It. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

For a fair portion of the opening sequence of It director Andy Muschietti locks in on the little fears of childhood. The creepy basement with little lighting, the empty streets, the things that lurk in the sewers. The sequence is a little disturbing, at least until the nefarious evil spirit Pennywise chomps a child’s arm off before dragging him off into the sewer. The build up falls asunder once the poorly rendered violence is shown on screen, and the movie never regains the opening sense of dread.

The quality of the horror in It depends greatly on how the eponymous supernatural being is employed and the performance of the actor in the role. As a creature that manifests itself in the form of a clown, Pennywise is a monster who has a need to torment his victims before consuming their souls and flesh. There's a lot of Freddy Krueger in Pennywise – using fear as a means of justifying their existence – although the clown has a bit more playfulness in his cruelty than Freddy, a friendliness to the menace that can put a child at ease for a moment or two. This Pennywise, played by Bill Skarsgard, is missing that puckishness and hints of misleading kindness. His malevolent intentions are never hidden underneath a facade of joy; he’s simply evil, which is a bit dull for a creature that spends so much time messing with the minds of children. Skarsgard tries too hard to be the scary manifestation of a clown without making the audience feel uncomfortable around him. Nothing offsets the attempts at terror, most of which are ineffective anyway, to offer a balance between general clown behavior and embodiment of humanity's fears.

While Skarsgard doesn't play up the character's designed hamminess, the movie provides few opportunities to allow the character to be creepy either, showing several of his nastier acts instead of implying the pain Pennywise inflicts. Once Pennywise bites that child’s arm off the audience effectively loses the possibilities of the potential horrors. All of the awful things Pennywise could and would do to a child, is negated by showing exactly what he'll do. Horror by implication can be much more effective than horror depicted on screen, especially for a movie with lackluster CGI like It.

A lot of the problems with this movie can be pinned on the atrocious script. It can be painful to watch because of random tonal shifts – a blood cleaning montage comes to mind – that undermine the horror atmosphere. Some of the decisions made are baffling, including repeated scenes in which the kids just keep running off on their own despite clear evidence doing so is a very, very bad idea. Horror has some lenience when it comes to the idiot plot – scary situations can justify some moronic behaviors – but It crosses the line between realistic stupidity and cinematic stupidity egregiously. A couple of choices make it seem as if the writers felt some sense of fealty to the original novel’s writer Stephen King, including padding out the run time to push what should be a sub two-hour movie into a two-and-a-quarter-hour slog. There’s also the less than stellar choice to have the most interesting character, Sophia Lillis' Beverly Marsh, be the victim of incest, get kidnapped by Pennywise, and put under a spell to eventually get the Sleeping Beauty treatment/get sexually assaulted.

Lillis though is pretty great as Beverly, as are the rest of the child actors (Jaeden Lieberher, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Finn Wolfhard, Chosen Jacobs, Jack Dylan Grazer, and Wyatt Oleff) that form the circle of friends fighting against Pennywise. Their interactions in the moments between supernatural attacks are fun and engaging, reflecting the awkward period between childhood and the early teen years. Even their obnoxious moments are realistic and pretty funny thanks to Wolfhard's delivery and the retorts volleyed back by Oleff. As a coming of age story It could be pretty good with this cast and better writing.

The ultimate failures in horror though serve as the ultimate let down for It. The scenes with the kids being kids build the bond they have and establish those characters as likable and at least worth rooting for. But there’s still the need for terror, to put those kids into situations beyond their control. Even with an immortal creature that dresses like a clown and eats children, It misses the mark so much viewers won’t have to keep the lights on to go to sleep at night.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 135 Minutes

Genre: Horror

Ask Away

Target audience: Stephen King acolytes and viewers who aren't completely averse to clowns.

Take the whole family?: Considering a kid gets his arm bitten off by a clown, and the presence of more than one clown, stick close to the rating.

Theater or Netflix?: This one might play better at home in the dark without an audience mocking it.

What do you think of clowns?: I'm pretty horrified by them. The idea of the artificial smile obscuring true emotions bothers me on many levels, as does the overly friendly behavior and the buffoonish antics. The scariest part of the entire film was the reminder that a man dressed as a clown was just four rows behind me the entire time, at least as far as I knew.

Watch this instead?: The first half of the 1990 miniseries It is at least OK, highlighted by Tim Curry's insanely effective turn as Pennywise. The newer version shares a lot with a show that hits hard on the 1980s vibe and horror, Stranger Things.