Tom Cruise has delivered enough iconic movie lines throughout his four-decade career to fill an entire list. Top Gun gave him “I feel the need – the need for speed,” Jerry Maguire has “Show me the money,” and A Few Good Men lets him go toe-to-toe with Jack Nicholson in one of the most quoted courtroom scenes in movie history. Of course, some of Cruise’s movie quotes are cool just because he said them.
Ethan Hunt has been calmly accepting impossible missions for decades, while Maverick practically built his personality around the belief there was no situation he couldn’t fly out of. Cruise’s coolest line, however, is considerably less famous. It comes from 2017’s American Made, in which he plays real-life pilot Barry Seal, and it’s only eight words long. Barry Seal is nothing short of a wild, reckless antihero, but it’s just because of that chaotic personality that he gave Cruise the coolest quote of his career.
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American Made Lets Tom Cruise Cut Loose
Directed by Doug Liman, American Made is somewhat based on the extraordinary true story of Barry Seal, a former TWA pilot who helped smuggle drugs for Pablo Escobar, Jorge Ochoa, and the wider Medellín Cartel, before becoming an informant for the DEA. The movie kicks off with Barry bored by the predictability of commercial flying when CIA operative Monty Schafer, played by Domhnall Gleeson, offers him a considerably more exciting job flying reconnaissance missions over Central America. Barry doesn’t need much persuading, and before long, he’s running guns and cocaine and making more money than he can hide.
Behind the scenes, stunt pilot Alan Purwin and local pilot Carlos Berl tragically died in a plane crash while filming American Made. Jimmy Lee Garland suffered life-changing injuries.
Calling Barry a hero is very generous; he’s a smuggler, an opportunist, and a reckless man whose only response to discovering he’s dangerously over his head is to keep going and hope everything works out. It’s why Cruise is absolutely perfect in the role. He’s charming, confident, and impossibly skilled, and though his signature movie star grin makes several appearances, Barry Seal has none of the discipline that usually keeps Cruise’s characters in control. The more ridiculous Barry’s life becomes, the more Cruise seems to be enjoying himself.
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Barry’s Wildest Escapades Lead to His Perfect Line
The fast-paced American Made condenses a lot of the real Barry Seal’s life into a single movie, and the film barely gives him enough time to process one terrible decision before presenting him with another. He goes from flying CIA missions to transporting drugs for Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel, supplying weapons to the Contras, and eventually working with the US government against the very people he was, once, doing business with.
At one point, Barry is making so much money that his family literally runs out of places to put it – cash is stuffed into closets, buried in the backyard, and stored in a bank that Barry overwhelms with deposits. He recounts many of these escapades through videotaped messages recorded when the situation has collapsed around him after years of playing every side. During one videotape, he offers an almost comically understated explanation for how he ended up there with just eight words:
I do tend to leap before I look.
Barry immediately acknowledges that asking a few more questions probably wouldn’t have hurt, but by this point in American Made, it feels like the understatement of the century. What he actually does for most of the runtime is agree to increasingly dangerous and high-stakes propositions with remarkably little concern for what might happen when the excitement inevitably wears off.
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Eight Words Separate Barry From Tom Cruise’s Usual Heroes
Tom Cruise has made a career out of playing men who leap before anyone else would dare to, and they’re usually capable enough to survive the landing. Ethan Hunt can jump out of an airplane, scale the Burj Khalifa, or drive a motorcycle off a cliff, precisely because Mission: Impossible has spent years establishing that he does these things with the conviction of someone who can pull them off. Maverick is similarly reckless in Top Gun, and his confidence comes from knowing just how good he is in a cockpit. Both of those characters have iconic lines, but Barry’s “I do tend to leap before I look” quote has an effortlessly cool quality.
Barry leaps without looking, and when the landing finally hurts, he isn’t pretending otherwise. The line is essentially him looking back at the spectacular mess he’s created, with the nonchalant self-awareness that he probably should’ve given it more thought. There’s something inherently cool about a larger-than-life character looking at a huge disaster of his own making, recognizing exactly what his problem is, and delivering the diagnosis with little more than a shrug. American Made takes the charm, fearlessness, and appetite for danger typically associated with Tom Cruise’s best action movie characters and removes all aura of invincibility so Barry can finally fall from grace.
It may not be the most iconic line Cruise has ever delivered in his illustrious career, but it’s effortlessly cool. He took several major leaps, misjudged them, and seemingly didn’t regret it at all.
Release Date
September 29, 2017
Runtime
115 minutes
Director
Doug Liman
Domhnall Gleeson
Monty ‘Schafer’
Jesse Plemons
Sheriff Downing
