American Made

You're being glib, filmmakers. There is, no doubt, an interesting story embedded in this work, though here the dots connect a bit too directly. There's too little development from point to point for everything not to feel rushed and incomplete. One suspects that those behind this flick decided to rely a little too heavily on Tom Cruise's charisma, which is still there but is not quite forceful enough to overcome this movie's defects. And it engenders no goodwill when the director insists upon using the utterly hackneyed technique of the shaky, hand-held camera to impart faux energy. That decision alone tells you that everything was not quite well thought out here. The MEOW is precarious; it could be a HISS, but there's just enough entertainment value here to keep the Cat in a relatively good mood. But one suspects this could have been a lot better.