There’s been this new drama/action thriller genre over the past couple decards. I’ve come to think of these movies as Icarus Movies. They’re “Based on a True Story” movies, where an American risk-taker gets sucked into an international criminal enterprise, gets caught up in the lavish lifestyle, flies too close to the sun, and then ultimately gets caught. Sometimes they make it out relatively alright*, sometimes they don’t. You know the ones I mean. War Dogs, Molly’s Game, Blow. Catch Me If You Can and The Wolf of Wall Street even qualify (though they succeed on a much higher level than the rest of the genre).
They’re fun movies, and they fully take advantage of dramatic license that the medium affords them. The “based on” part of “based on a true story” is what makes these movies so intriguing. We like to say to ourselves, “fact is stranger than fiction,” and “you couldn’t make this stuff up.” But we could make it up, and have done just that throughout cinematic history. But we’re sucked in by that sliver of truth. We like to think that crazy things like this actually happen in the world. It lets us live out all those fantastical daydreams of adventure and danger and MONEY and extravagance. That’s why we like watching movies like American Made. Even if we know deep down that something smells rotten underneath. But for a couple hours, we can live vicariously through “real life” characters that fly too close to the sun, without having to worry about getting burned up.
* “alright” is subjective here. These movies often end with a sense of finality, even though many of the real-life characters are still living (so their stories are still incomplete), OR they’ve had long-lasting consequences (such as George Jung from Blow). It’s more cinematic to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, even if the real life situations these movies are based on aren’t always so cut and dry.
3.5 out of 5 stars