Delighted to announce that I have made a second guest appearance on movie podcast SpyHards, on which, ahem, special agents Scott and Cam “go deep undercover into the shadowy world of cloak and dagger cinema on a mission to determine the greatest spy films of all time.” I joined them to talk about the 2017 Doug Liman action-crime black comedy American Made, starring Tom Cruise, Sarah Wright, Domhnall Gleeson, Caleb Landry Jones, and Jesse Plemons. (Read my 2017 review.)
Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Castro, or at the SpyHards website.
(On my previous appearance last year, we yakked about Zero Dark Thirty.)
I haven’t seen this film, but I was reminded of a thing about recent Tom Cruise, which really struck me while watching The Mummy (also 2017): he always seems to want his character to be in the middle of every possible shot, and to look like the aw-shucks charming good guy. In The Mummy (where it’s documented that he interfered a lot with production to enlarge his screen time) it’s his character’s actions that cause almost all the problems, and diegetically nobody notices, presumably because he’s just so darn adorable – and it sounds as though you collectively ended up getting a similar impression here.
I have a lot of trouble taking Tom Cruise seriously, because Tig Notaro pointed out that the two of them look exactly alike.