Watch Tom Cruise get funny in the trailer for… | Little White Lies

Trailers

Watch Tom Cruise get fun­ny in the trail­er for Amer­i­can Made

05 Jun 2017

Words by David Ehrlich

Doug Liman’s lat­est plays the slick, sliv­er-tongued chancer sto­ry for laughs.

Tom Cruise needs a big fat hit, and fast. Okay, so he’s still got the Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble fran­chise as a cosy block­buster safe­ty net, but rather too many of his lone action hero star vehi­cles have fall­en a lit­tle flat of late.

So instead of punch­ing out anoth­er sequel or a new, less­er iter­a­tion of Jack Reach­er, he’s returned to his 1980s hey­day with direc­tor Doug Liman’s jol­ly-look­ing lat­est, Amer­i­can Made. The per­ma-scowl is final gone, mak­ing way for that cheeky grin that was flashed like it’s no big thing in films such as Risky Busi­ness and The Colour of Mon­ey. And it’s good to see it once more.

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This stranger-than-fic­tion sto­ry is set dur­ing the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion, this new one sees the Cruis­er play­ing a TWA pilot named Bar­ry Seal who decides to kick his com­fort­able life up a notch. Tak­ing advan­tage of his clean-cut, all-Amer­i­can demeanour, Domh­nall Gleeson’s Mon­ty Schafer inducts Bar­ry to help the CIA arm anti-com­mu­nist rebels in South Amer­i­ca and, as this first trail­er seems to sug­gest, it all goes pret­ty wrong.

Liman and Cruise worked well togeth­er on the time-switch­ing sci-fi b‑movie, Edge of Tomor­row, and, even though Amer­i­can Made looks to fol­low a fair­ly stan­dard rise-and-fall arc, at least it looks one of Hollywood’s favourite sons has been giv­en a chance to flex his act­ing muscles.

Amer­i­can Made is released in UK cin­e­mas on 24 August.

Two illustrated book covers depicting a smiling Black man wearing a hat and tie, with a city skyline in the background

LWLies 107: The Sin­ners issue – Out now!

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