American Assassin

Directed By: Michael CuestaWritten By: Stephen Schiff, Michael Finch, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz (based on the novel American Assassin by Vince Flynn)Starring: Dylan O’Brien, Michael Keaton, Sanaa Lathan, Taylor Kitsch

American Assassin opens on the beautiful Ibiza beachside where all manner of tourists have collected. Mitch Rapp is one (Dylan O’Brien), his girlfriend Katrina (Charlotte Vega), to whom he has just proposed, another. We know from the trailer that immediately out of this moment of peace comes a moment of horror. Terrorists suddenly open fire on the beach, calmly trudging along the sand and picking off whoever happens to be nearby with a chilling calculatedness— Katrina one of the victims. It’s a moment which taps into a very palpable fear, something which seems to mar real-world television screens all too often.

There are a string of sequences just like this in the film, where hapless tourists in Europe are scattered by the indiscriminate shooting of someone hateful. It happens along a busy street In Poland and in a packed café in Turkey too. But if all this makes American Assassin sound as though it’s a film of veracity and unpleasant truths, rest assured, it isn’t.

Directed by Michael Cuesta and based on the 2010 novel of the same name by Vince Flynn (there are slew of novels centring on Mitch Rapp dating as far back as 1999), American Assassin swiftly aligns itself with any number of lobotomised Hollywood action thrillers—the shoot-first-and-don’t-bother-asking-questions sort of product– except this one has been largely drained of vitality.

18 months later we are reintroduced to Mitch via a montage as he preps for his elaborate revenge— throwing knives with a surgeon’s precision, shooting the chests off range targets, ferociously practising judo, boxing maniacally, growing into a physical force that would put a tremor in James Bond’s knees. Mitch, since that fateful day, has also brushed up on the Qur’an, helping him infiltrate a terrorist cell where he is to be tested for recruitment by those responsible for his trauma. The CIA, who have been using Mitch as an unknowing sherpa to the bad guys, at the last-minute swoop in and steal his kill, before cool and collected Deputy Director Irene Kennedy (Sanaa Lathan) offers Mitch a place in a top-secret program. The program is called Orion, and seeks to plant ghost assassins in the field to wreak havoc on terrorist groups; think the Treadstone program from the Jason Bourne saga without the moral conditioning.

Mitch is taken to the Virginian wilderness for his training where he’s hosted by grizzled ex-Navy SEAL Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton), a sort of cross between R Lee Ermey’s drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket and Gordon Liu’s martial arts master from Kill Bill. He educates Mitch, and a class of lesser talents, on how to properly slice a throat, on how to keep cool in battle, on all manner of nifty hand-to-hand combats, but most importantly, on how to remain emotionally divorced from the mission. In this line of work, one can never be governed by their feelings, they must be cold, objective, unclouded. It’s a series of teachings which seem to mimic the film’s own making, extending beyond the page and, to the film’s detriment, into the craft. An impersonal, unfeeling demeanour is a great trait in a killer, not so much in a story.        

American Assassin replicates much of what we know from other like-minded action romps. It has ample location hopping, a high body count, slick and punchy choreography, but none of the metal where it counts. The film amounts to Atomic Blonde without the style, John Wick without the frenzy, the Bourne films without the intrigue or characters. This lack of colour is exasperated by our protagonist, who is so devoid of humour, charm and personality (Rapp is just a guy who’s good at killing), that the film’s biggest fatality is that of viewer sympathies.

We can’t even enjoy the film’s well-crafted action sequences as we should, so bleak and ill-fittingly brooding is Cuesta’s preferred tone. American Assassin is much too serious for its own good, it’s underlining darkness never jiving with the bombastic nature of the set-pieces. The action in and of itself is slickly arranged and well-staged, but Cuesta seems to rub our noses in the violence of it all to no apparent gain, lingering for a moment too long on visions of ripped flesh and pierced muscle—too bleak to be enjoyed in the giddily nihilistic way one would enjoy Tarantino’s bloodletting, too Hollywood “action-hero” to bear the authentic, bruising impact of, say, Sam Peckinpah’s unique brand of calamity.

There’s a bad guy of course, he goes by the codename Ghost and he’s compiling parts for an atomic bomb, along the way finding himself the object of Hurley’s eye. Ghost, it isn’t a spoiler to say, is an American—the villain has to be, less the film rather unhelpfully propagate the demonization of Middle Easterners— an alumnus of Orion who’s gone rogue, played by Taylor Kitsch. There’s a point to be made with Ghost, he offers a mechanism for holding a mirror up to America, highlighting that anger and hate is as much brewed in the Western backyard as it is abroad, but Cuesta has no intention of being the one to make it. Where the film has a chance to delineate itself from its genre siblings, where it has a chance to take a stand and become its own entity, once again it backs down, lacking the conviction to tackle the themes of radicalisation and hate begetting hate that the material flirts with.

Only Michael Keaton looks to inject life into proceedings, tapping into that wild energy that made him such an irresistible enigma in films such as Batman and Beetlejuice. Cast your mind to that scene in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman where Keaton’s Bruce Wayne wielded a fire iron like a machete and told The Joker, “you wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts!”, that’s the Michael Keaton on display here, cool and in control, but channelling an unhinged energy that causes one to question otherwise. Stan Hurley is the type to taunt his torturer, blood oozing from his mouth, maybe even liking it a bit. In one scene, Stan has a nail ripped from the finger, to which he bellows “I’ve got nine more!”. That’s the sort of life I want from a high-octane action potboiler. It’s the sort of life American Assassin needs more of.

Rating:

1.5/4