Amer­i­can Assassin

As pro­to-fas­cist, reac­tionary Hol­ly­wood action films go, Amer­i­can Assas­sin is mer­ci­ful­ly not the most dis­taste­ful of recent exam­ples. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this isn’t due to any incur­sion of lib­er­al ideas into the mix, but sole­ly to inco­her­ent sto­ry­telling. What slen­der val­ue the film does have has lit­tle to do with its sto­ry or polit­i­cal message.

The film opens as hand­some hunk Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’Brien) pro­pos­es to his win­some girl­friend Kat­ri­na (Char­lotte Vega) on a beach in Ibiza. Despite the total bliss that the cou­ple are expe­ri­enc­ing there is some­thing in the unset­tling­ly sat­u­rat­ed look of the image that sug­gests a sense of impend­ing vio­lence. Sure enough the sequence ends in grue­some blood­shed as a group of heav­i­ly armed ter­ror­ists attack the tourists. This hys­ter­i­cal­ly over­wrought sequence reach­es a point of delir­i­um when Kat­ri­na is killed right in front of Mitch while he is mirac­u­lous­ly spared.

This open­ing sets the tone for the remain­der of the movie, an angry and unusu­al­ly nasty revenge flick which only checks its furi­ous rage a few times for good mea­sure. Back in Amer­i­ca, Mitch trains intense­ly in mar­tial arts skills, learns how to shoot guns and kill with all man­ner of weapons, and even teach­es him­self Ara­bic. This is all in order to infil­trate the ter­ror­ist cell behind Katrina’s death. When Mitch final­ly meets face-to-face with the man respon­si­ble for his girlfriend’s death and pre­pares for revenge, the CIA sud­den­ly swoops in and kills the ter­ror­ist them­selves, tak­ing away from Mitch the one thing he has been train­ing for and look­ing for­ward to for months.

Ini­tial­ly appear­ing as an instance of the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment dis­cour­ag­ing vig­i­lante jus­tice and blind, emo­tion­al hatred for the ene­my, we quick­ly realise this is far from the case. CIA coun­tert­er­ror­ism chief Irene Kennedy (Sanaa Lath­an) instead con­sid­ers Mitch – a man so ded­i­cat­ed to revenge that at 23 years old he has already trained for months in the art of mur­der – as hav­ing ​“the per­fect psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­file” to join her spe­cial unit of killing machines.

This is where the film leaves the realms of the real for good and becomes much more enjoy­able as a fan­ta­sy genre exer­cise, a dis­play of mus­cles and cin­e­mat­ic vio­lence. The pres­ence of Poirot him­self, David Suchet, as the direc­tor of the CIA fur­thers this impres­sion and the film only gets sil­li­er from there on in, its pol­i­tics becom­ing quite irrel­e­vant in com­par­i­son to its sense of nasty fun.

Mitch joins a train­ing camp led by sadis­tic ex-Navy SEAL Stan Hur­ley (played with inten­si­ty by a pout­ing Michael Keaton) and engages in all sorts of glo­ri­ous­ly over the top and entire­ly humour­less exer­cis­es. These are gen­uine­ly fun to watch, com­ing as close to the bloody train­ing sequences of Star­ship Troop­ers as a straight-faced movie can.

A real high­light is a mind-blow­ing­ly neu­rot­ic vir­tu­al real­i­ty train­ing ses­sion where Mitch must resist the temp­ta­tion of shoot­ing at a holo­gram of the ter­ror­ist who killed his girl­friend. Com­ing straight out of the Mark Wahlberg school of act­ing, O’Brien has an unde­ni­able resem­blance to his Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon co-star, from the hair­cut and shirt to the accent and facial expres­sions. How­ev­er, his more real­is­tic body gives a real edge to the char­ac­ter that Wahlberg’s appear­ance of a body­builder cannot.

The only thing that Hur­ley real­ly has to teach Mitch is that though he is angry at those who killed his girl­friend, he must nev­er let it ​“get per­son­al” when in the field. Mitch absolute­ly, 100 per cent does not man­age to learn this. But because of his resolve and self-taught phys­i­cal abil­i­ties, he is assigned to find who­ev­er stole mas­sive quan­ti­ties of plu­to­ni­um from a Russ­ian facil­i­ty, along­side anoth­er CIA trainee (Scott Adkins) and Turk­ish agent Anni­ka (Shi­va Neggar).

Trav­el­ing across Europe, the team tracks the var­i­ous peo­ple relat­ed to the miss­ing bomb com­po­nent. Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Enrique Che­di­ak brings out the beau­ty of every set­ting, which makes the nas­ti­ness and ridicu­lous­ness of pro­ceed­ings stand in rather amus­ing con­trast. Indeed, the film slow­ly but sure­ly aban­dons all pre­tence of being a seri­ous polit­i­cal thriller. One deli­cious­ly sim­plis­tic nar­ra­tive twist straight out of a Bros­nan Bond film has the team track the man who owns the bomb det­o­na­tor, until they make the con­nec­tion with ulti­mate vil­lain ​“Ghost” (Tay­lor Kitsch).

Kitsch and O’Brien occu­py the same cat­e­go­ry of white, Amer­i­can, beefed up action actor. Here they play essen­tial­ly the same char­ac­ter. Also trained by Keaton’s Hur­ley, Ghost is sim­i­lar­ly moti­vat­ed by vengeance, and has long giv­en up on try­ing not to let it ​“get per­son­al.” Though this is one of those clas­sic sit­u­a­tions where the vil­lain and the hero are on two sides of the same coin, Kitsch’s per­for­mance is almost indis­tin­guish­able from O’Brien’s, and there is no sense that one char­ac­ter is more insane or evil than the other.

The movie gets a lit­tle lost try­ing to jus­ti­fy his being the only bad guy and the final dra­mat­ic show­down suf­fers from this con­fu­sion in a way the film’s oth­er action sequences do not. Enjoy­ably slick, gen­uine­ly tense and well exe­cut­ed, most of this sil­ly, throw­away film is car­ried with con­vic­tion by O’Brien, a tal­ent worth watch­ing in lit­er­al­ly any old toss.