The New American Made Trailer Promises a Lot of Drug Smuggling and Tom Cruise
The trailer for the new Tom Cruise movie American Made just dropped and it promises all kinds of rip-roaring, drug-smuggling, Contra-funding fun.
The trailer starts with a plane crash which is a little unfortunate given that the movie is currently the subject of a lawsuit over a 2015 plane crash during production that killed two crew members. From there it looks like your standard “getting rich off illicit activity” story in the vein of Wolf of Wall Street, Goodfellas, Blow, American Hustle, etc., with Cruise’s character running drugs and guns for the CIA in Nicaragua the 1980s. Here’s hoping he doesn’t get in over his head!
The film’s Wikipedia page describes it as a “biographical criminal comedy-drama-thriller film” (not another!) based on the life of Barry Seal, “a former TWA pilot who became a drug smuggler in the 1980s and was recruited later on by the DEA to provide intelligence.” Seal is a character on the Netflix show Narcos and the trailer has much of that vibe too, down to the voice-over.
Seal’s story is good one, but if you do even a modest amount of research on about him you’ll ruin the movie for yourself. Adapting it is a slick way of allowing Tom Cruise to be a drug dealer while also, as always, portraying a good guy—those first scenes of the trailer have Cruise covered in cocaine from the crash, but paying off a child with wads of cash to forget about the whole thing, so it’s all fine. Domhnall Gleeson is Cruise’s nefarious CIA foil and Cruise tries out a Southern accent for the first time in his career.
It’s all part of a recent career renaissance for Cruise, that may also include the pretty-weird-but-maybe-okay-looking The Mummy, anchored of course by his largest grossing film, 2011 Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol ($694 million, globally). Earlier today he also revealed the title of his upcoming Top Gun sequel, Top Gun: Maverick.
One of his later surprise hits was Edge of Tomorrow a.k.a. Live Die Repeat a.k.a. the movie we all agreed to watch on the plane and adore. American Made is another collaboration with director Doug Liman, who directed Live Die Repeat as well as The Bourne Identity. In a recent interview he revealed that there will in fact be a sequel to Live Die Repeat called, really, Live Die Repeat and Repeat.
Liman also said he lived with Cruise during the production of American Made and likened their relationship to that of The Odd Couple. Tom Cruise “eats nothing but greens and seeds” while Liman is “all about frozen pizzas.” “There was a lot of bitching about whose dishes were in the sink,” Liman said. “I would clean stuff, and he would pull it out of the dishwasher and say, ‘That’s not clean enough.'” What a cool, fun story about a VERY normal guy.
American Made hits theaters September 27.
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