Like too many Scorsese imitations, Tom Cruise’s American Made wants for a worldview

Doug Liman and Tom Cruise, the director-actor team behind Edge Of Tomorrow (one of our favorite science-fiction movies of the last three-and-a-half-decades), have reunited for American Made, a years-spanning biopic about a real-life pilot who got drafted into both the CIA and a South American drug-smuggling operation. The movie offers plenty of laughs and lots of style, but does it have anything at all to say? On this episode of Film Club, A.A. Dowd and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky break down why Cruise’s latest star vehicle doesn’t quite soar above “diverting.”