Tom Cruise's new movie has a lot going for it - he plays this kind of character well (the Knight and Day daredevil with a screw loose) and generates huge laughs as true-life Barry Seal in the 80s bumbling through the chaos of his myriad conflicting roles (simultaneously a CIA reconnaissance pilot, Pablo Escobar's drug runner, an arms supplier for the Contra in Nicaragua, a bribe deliveryman in Panama, not to mention a husband and a father of growing numbers of children), and the movie also offers up the dizzying sights of Central America passing below Seal's aircraft as he flies back and forth and back and forth between Arkansas and Colombia, but there's never a sense that Barry Seal is an American-made tragedy - the CIA and Pablo Escobar approach him because he was already the sort of character they could use (a wild and free agent living dangerously) and so there is no sympathy for him when things really spiral out of control, even if the Government is complicit in his crimes - he has dug his own grave and at the movie's end, viewers are spat out of the cinema having been momentarily swept up in an always interesting but chaotic, charmless whirlwind, and it probably doesn't occur to many of these viewers in their resigned state to stop and question who the shadowy figures are that approach Seal's car in the movie's final scenes, even though this is the question.
★★★☆☆
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