Barry Seal was a pilot just doing his day-to-day job when he was approached to work for the CIA taking photos from a plane, but he is lured into a world he had no idea existed entering the world of drug smuggling in the 1980s.
The story is told over “video tape” recordings direct from Barry Seal as the wicked world he entered has begun to close in on him. Obviously I didn’t realize that as it started as had no idea about this story or drug smuggling in all honesty. The thing is though the film makes you think about just how easy it was for them to smuggle drugs in small planes at that time.
Barry is a pretty charismatic man and just wanted to look after his wife and growing family. The thing is though considering he was lying to her for quite a while it was never going to be as perfect as he first thought. The good thing about the film was that it managed to mix humor in very well, I thought Tom Cruise did very well to drive and lead the film when at times it felt just a little bit short of anything really special. Something that I was pretty impressed with was Cruise and that you can never underestimate his acting ability.
Monty Schafer is a bit of a shady character and I actually doubted at times if he really was part of the CIA. Also very interesting to think about how they actually used and got rid of people just as quickly and more importantly any record of them actually doing work for them, especially when it turned into illegal missions. Seal was then very quickly taken into the drug smuggling world as he made thousands and then millions by dropping drugs around America.
It all just seemed to be a little bit too easy and simple the way that it was done. Which certainly makes you realize that it was actually true, I think that is probably how the comedy works so well with it all because the situation itself is just laughable to begin with and something that you cannot really get away from.
At times though it felt as though the running time was rather on the long side, by that I checked the time quite a few times as it went on. As it doesn’t really have a massive amount going on in it, like the video tapes and commentary to explain what had been happening some of it was slow build up to what becomes a rather obvious ending. It was also the start of the Cartel but that was only briefly looked at in terms of those men. Even though we saw them quite a lot on-screen we didn’t know a huge amount about them.
I guess I am pretty much undecided if this is worth watching or not, it wasn’t really bad or anything like that but it wasn’t really fantastic and really good either. I guess if you are a big Tom Cruise fan then you will appreciate his performance along with Gleeson who always impresses me to be honest!
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