Again, not a totally horrible film (but where else to talk about not particularly important, not especially good films?) but we just watched American Made the Tom Cruise vehicle from a few years back. In one sense it IS a crazy story about a pilot who gets hired by the CIA to take photos of Central American militias, then starts flying cocaine for the Medellin Cartel and then is caught by the DEA and forced to work for them - but at the same time it's also a familiar story, we basically know that the CIA was involved in drug smuggling and, more importantly for the film, we've seen this arc countless times before; crazy guy gets involved with drugs/guns and money, at first it goes well and he's coining it in, got too much to spend and is burying it in the garden and drinking champagne made of diamonds or whatever, before it turns dark and the walls start closing in and it's time to pay the price for his actions... with a final chance of some kind of redemption.
The issue for me was really Cruise, he plays it exactly as you've seen him so many times before, the gung-ho, grinning (short) action hero who is always one step ahead of his enemies, barely flustered by the stakes and the risks to himself and his family and so on. And this is where it fails - I watched Uncut Gems the other day and, although I was very mixed in my feelings for the film on the whole, what it did do was convey this sense of the main guy and the stress he felt, the tension in every event, the actual fear when threatened by the small time gangster and his reasonably intimidating heavies. But if you can smell the desperation of a dodgy jeweller under threat of some broken legs or a serious kicking - ok, at the end, aware that his life could be forfeit - shouldn't a guy who is being chased by the FBI, the DEA, local law enforcement, the fucking Escobar cartel and possibly the Nicaraguan army for good measure... shouldn't he be a little more concerned than shouting hurry up every now and again? Why can Adam Sandler make you feel at moments what it might be like to be in that situation and Tom Cruise can't even get close?
I don't know the answer but that was the difference.
