On June 30, Netflix will remove “Barry Seal: American Traffic”, a film by Doug Liman with Tom Cruise released in 2017, from its catalog.
Between two Mission Impossible missions, Tom Cruise slipped into the shoes of Barry Seal in 2017, a scam pilot recruited by the CIA in order to carry out one of the biggest secret operations in the history of the United States. Directed by Doug Liman, who already directed him in Edge of Tomorrow, the film unfortunately did not leave an indelible mark in the minds of spectators.
The king of waterfalls
And yet, Cruise and his team didn’t do things by halves in Barry Seal: American Traffic. Experienced and passionate pilots, the filmmaker and the actor were attached to the use of planes in the film… which they drove themselves:
“Tom did all the flying scenes himself, he even flew one of our planes to Colombia. That’s just the kind of plane Barry flew. He did 10-hour flights in little cuckoos ”, Liman revealed.
If the film offers us an unparalleled spectacle, it would not have been possible without the scouting work of the members of the team. Dangerous work, in a particularly hostile area since the filming of Barry Seal took place in Colombia, near Medellin. And the latter was marred by the tragic death of two experienced pilots, responsible for taking aerial shots and assessing the dangerousness of the scenes in question.
A mixed reception
Barry Seal received a fairly mixed reception from the press. In France, the media gave it a score of 2.9 out of 5 while criticizing it for the inconsistency of its scenario and the lack of tension, but still emphasizing its sense of spectacle. As for the spectators, they did not necessarily respond.
If American Traffic attracted 600,000 curious young people to cinemas – which is a very respectable figure – when we look more closely at the admissions achieved by Tom Cruise’s films, we are looking at a rather disappointing result.
A true king of the box office, the actor rarely misses his target and very regularly exceeds one million admissions in France. This is the case for Mission Impossible which oscillates between 2 and 3 million spectators. The remake of The Mummy in 2017 also crossed this symbolic bar. Let’s not even talk about Top Gun: Maverick and his heist in 2022 with more than 6 million tickets sold…
If, like many viewers, you missed Barry Seal: American Traffic, know that it is leaving Netflix on June 30.
