American Made - recommended

American Made, the 2017 Tom Cruise movie which I was tempted to see at the cinema, but it made little money and came and went very quickly,  has turned up on Australian Netflix.  I watched it on the weekend.

It's very well made, and very entertaining - a really good Tom Cruise vehicle.  The director, Doug Liman, also made Edge of Tomorrow with Cruise, and on the strength of those two movies I have to say he's a director to watch, but I see he's been around quite a while, just making movies which I wasn't drawn to.  I've never watched his earlier Mr & Mrs Smith, for example - it looked and sounded pretty silly and over the top in concept and execution - but maybe I should give it a go now.)

As usual, in the case of a "based on a true story" movie, I was expecting it to bear anything from about a 25 to 50% relationship to real life.   And I'm correct - after watching the movie, you can go to this quite detailed explanation of what was and wasn't accurate to real life in the movie.   (An awful lot was really based only on rumours of his contact with the CIA - but then again, certain key aspects were true.)

It's not the sort of movie over which I am going to get uptight about its historical inaccuracies, in that it's clearly not being intended as a biopic.  It's more like a fictionalised famous crime figure story, and I can accept that, when it has such high entertainment value.

Post script:  One other thing.  I realised when thinking about this movie that one reason I might like Tom Cruise action movies is that they do not usually (or ever?) engage in big, blood splatteringly graphic examples of violence - there's no shots of brains being blown out of heads for entertainment or shock value, for example, as is so annoyingly prevalent in a lot of movies and cable TV now.    He seems to share my sensibility or threshold as to what is acceptable in movie violence - fists, stabbing and action is all OK, but not to the level of gruesome.

Or am I forgetting something he's been in?   I don't count the silly OTT scenes at the start of Tropic Thunder - that was meant to be satire of war movies, surely.  (I couldn't get far into that movie anyway - for reasons I have explained before.)