The real story about Barry Seal would take a whole season of one-hour episodes. This movie merely takes the idea of Barry Seal and creates a fictitious story about him, but it's historical fiction; truthiness wrapped up in a story. We get an idea of who the real Barry Seal was, and we get a taste of the huge mess in which he was caught-up. It's dumbed down and summarized enough that the average person might believe they know about Seal. The real Seal was far more interesting than this cardboard cut-out of him. He was working for the CIA back as far as 1958, involved in operations in Cuba and Central America long before the Iran-Contra operations began. There are alleged links to the Kennedy Assassination as pilot of a "getaway plane" from Dallas that day. He had stood trial and gotten off due to technicalities long before the events of the movie. By the time of the Iran/Contra scandal, Seal was a seasoned veteran of CIA operations and drug smugglers, and a familiar face and name to the US Justice System, as well as to power players in Washington, D.C.
Seal's assassins were Columbians, but they claimed to be taking orders from Ollie North, on behalf of GHW Bush, who wanted Seal out of the way for a number of reasons. But all that would not have fit neatly into a single movie. The story in this movie uses Seal as a character, and uses some of his exploits, but the timeline is nothing like the real one, and Seal's 28 year affiliation with the CIA is ignored.
Despite all that, a lot of actual history is used, and a significant amount of research went into the making of the story, not to mention the archival footage alone. I think the movie well expresses the central tenet: "it ain't a crime if you're doing it for the good guys." Seal was of no value to anyone if he only worked for the good guys. His value was specificially that he knew all the players, good and bad, on a first-name basis. He could hook you up with the most powerful people in the world. The movie alludes to this and makes a good story of it.
I applaud the makers of the movie for showing clearly and unambiguously that our own leaders are not clean and untainted by the actions of the underworld, but that it's often hard to say where one side stops and another starts. That alone makes it a worthwhile effort. That they were able to tell this story in an entertaining way is amazing. I think most people will come away from this either confirming their beliefs about a system gone very wrong, or else changing their beliefs in our government and coming to understand that our system has been broken beyond repair for a very, very long time. Bravo for that. Cruise is great in the role, seemingly a perfect fit, even if he's nothing like Barry. I'm not a TC fan, so that's saying a lot. I'm just glad this movie got made, inaccuracies be damned! Its spirit is what counts, and that comes across full-bore.