A grinning Cruise is back in Top Gun territory in Doug Liman’s sort-of-true story about a bored pilot who starts working for a Colombian cartel and the CIA

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You’d need a heart of stone not to indulge Tom Cruise’s midlife return to Top Gun antics in this flashy, entertaining crime thriller by director Doug Liman, featuring Tom with blindingly toothy grin and sunglasses whizzing around in his light aircraft with US Customs agents riding his tail (to quote Roger Avary).

It’s based on the sort-of-true-ish story of a former TWA pilot who in 1984 was arrested for gun-running, money-laundering and carrying drugs in his plane for Colombia’s Medellín Cartel. He cut a deal to incriminate bigger players and claimed he had been involved with government intelligence agencies from the outset – this movie sportingly takes him at his word.

Cruise plays Barry Seal, competent but bored airline pilot and impeccable husband to super-hot wife Lucy (Sarah Wright). He is very excited to be approached by shadowy CIA man Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson) and asked to fly a spy plane over Central America to photograph communist insurgents. His roistering antics catch the attention of Pablo Escobar’s drug barons who force him to fly their cocaine to the US. Then he is bullied by Schafer with a new plan: fly guns to Nicaragua’s anti-communist rebels, the contras, who are actually more interested in selling the drugs that the Colombians had given them in exchange for these guns – a murky setup which the movie suggests laid the foundations for the Iran-Contra deal.

It’s a salacious war-story picture that leans heavily on the voiceover-flashback style pioneered in GoodFellas, and it reminded me a little of Ted Demme’s tiresome coke history Blow (2001), or more recently something like Todd Phillips’s War Dogs (2016). But the beamingly ingenuous Cruise, whose character is not burdened with any doubts or an inner life, somehow sells it to you.