Tom Cruise is stepping away from the action-hero routine — at least for the project immediately ahead of him.
Cruise’s upcoming film Digger may defy easy description, but its trailers are right about one thing: this is not a conventional action movie. Cruise is not playing another stoic, death-defying hero. Instead, prosthetics make him look much closer to his actual age of 64 than he does in real life, as a wealthy, influential oil executive forced to confront the consequences of a possible environmental catastrophe.
Cruise has recently announced another fountain-of-youth project, a sequel to Days of Thunder, and is reportedly planning to make a third Top Gun eventually. But Digger places him on a very different kind of high wire. It marks his first film without an action-adventure element since American Made, the 2017 dramatic thriller currently streaming on HBO Max.
Technically, American Made ranks among the lowest-grossing films of Cruise’s career — and certainly among his weakest performers in North America over the past 35 years. Since the 1990s, only Lions for Lambs, Rock of Ages, and Magnolia earned less domestically. Two of those films were hurt by poor reviews, while all three were marketed more as ensemble productions than as traditional star vehicles. Even Cruise’s attempt to launch a new Dark Universe franchise with The Mummy sold more tickets than his other 2017 release, American Made. That does not make American Made a straightforward flop. For an adult-oriented movie with fewer stunts and visual effects than most of Cruise’s post-2010 films, it performed respectably. In today’s post-pandemic market — an unpredictable environment that has been particularly difficult for mid-budget films — the same box office would look fairly healthy. More importantly, the movie offers one of the clearest glimpses of what a post-action Tom Cruise career could become.
Directed by Doug Liman, American Made is a compelling throwback to 1980s cinema. It plays like an alternate take on — or even a quiet rebuttal to — the high-flying spectacle of Top Gun, the defining Cruise hit of then, now, and likely always. Cruise portrays Barry Seal, a real-life pilot who flies commercial airliners rather than fighter jets. Bored by his routine regional flights, Barry deliberately creates a little turbulence to rouse his sleeping co-pilot. He is already supplementing his income by smuggling small packages, mostly Cuban cigars, when the CIA takes notice. The agency recruits him as an independent contractor for dangerous reconnaissance flights over Central America. Before long, Barry is acting as a CIA courier and, in an unauthorized side business that echoes his earlier cigar runs, a drug smuggler. The drug operation is not officially sanctioned by the CIA, although the agency seems largely indifferent as long as Barry continues working for them. At one point, officials even give him an airport and acres of surrounding property. Other agencies take a very different view, and Barry soon finds himself in serious trouble.
Cruise fans who have grown uneasy with the increasingly reverential tone of the recent Mission: Impossible films may find a refreshing contrast in American Made. Barry Seal is considerably less virtuous than Ethan Hunt. He is not necessarily drawn to a life of crime, but in the direct-to-camera VHS recordings that help frame the story, he admits that he tends to “leap without looking” — and not in the polished, heroic manner of Ethan Hunt. Barry wants to provide for his wife and children, and he does not appear particularly interested in the glamour, romance, or power commonly linked to the drug trade. What he craves is excitement. Commercial aviation has become too dull for him, so he pursues the thrill of speed that defined Top Gun, unleashing that “need for speed” within the blandly capitalist world he once flew — and fought, in a sense — for in those less complicated movies.
American Made was directed by Doug Liman, one of several filmmakers — alongside Steven Spielberg, Cameron Crowe, and Joseph Kosinski — who have made two films with Cruise without reaching a third. Only Christopher McQuarrie, Cruise’s longtime collaborator on the later Mission: Impossible movies, has directed three or more Cruise films. Liman’s other Cruise project was Edge of Tomorrow, which may feature Cruise’s finest pure performance of the past two decades. In that film, he effortlessly combines the youthful arrogance he once played so often with middle-aged slickness and cowardice, while retaining his action-star credibility. The movie even gives him a sometimes precarious romance, expressed through his obvious admiration for Emily Blunt’s character.
American Made offers a less definitive portrait of Barry Seal beyond his Maverick-like pleasure in racing through any airspace he can reach, legal or not. Before his public-image reset around 2010, Cruise made films such as Magnolia, Vanilla Sky, and War of the Worlds that stripped away his characters’ confidence and charm to expose something more wounded beneath the surface. In American Made, he relies on a familiar collection of expressions as a form of protective armor: the dawning realization usually reserved for fixing a plan after an impossible-mission gadget fails, or for absorbing a colleague’s betrayal; the cautious, polite smile he uses while evaluating a situation. He is no longer the self-satisfied charmer of his younger years, but he never fully confronts the consequences of his own recklessness, either. His trademark aviator sunglasses become a kind of shield, deflecting the deeper spiritual examination associated with Scorsese and keeping the film closer to the intoxicating, if not especially probing, crime dramas of the Blow variety.
That is not necessarily a weakness. Liman and Cruise give American Made so much momentum that the film does not need to dig much deeper to remain entertaining. It does, however, lean on familiar crime-movie devices, including the reckless associate who costs the antihero money and much more, along with government betrayals that leave Barry exposed to dangerous enemies after he agrees to cooperate. The filmmakers never quite unlock the character as fully as they do in Edge of Tomorrow — perhaps because that film’s spectacle served as a different kind of emotional protection.
The film’s difficulty in reaching Barry Seal’s inner life may offer a clue about Cruise’s eventual direction as his stunt-driven career appears, if not finished, at least somewhat restrained. Since the couch-jumping controversy of the mid-2000s, Cruise has become more guarded in public, and that reserve has seeped into his performances. It works effectively for action heroes, but it can make his more grounded characters feel unusually — and sometimes intriguingly — opaque. Characters such as Barry Seal become difficult to read partly because Cruise plays them with such charisma while withholding their moments of realization.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
Stream American Made on HBO Max