American Assassin | Little White Lies

Amer­i­can Assassin

15 Sep 2017 / Released: 14 Sep 2017

A man in a dark outfit holding a rifle, with a serious expression on his face.
A man in a dark outfit holding a rifle, with a serious expression on his face.
3

Anticipation.

Dylan O’Brien has always been great, and the rest of the cast is promising too.

3

Enjoyment.

Way sillier than expected, but the action sequences are enjoyable and the hysterical tone is amusing.

2

In Retrospect.

Quite boring in the end – a fun time at the movies, but not one we’ll remember.

A strong per­for­mance by Dylan O’Brien can’t save this reac­tionary and very sil­ly revenge flick.

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.

You might like

Accessibility Settings

Text

Applies the Open Dyslexic font, designed to improve readability for individuals with dyslexia.

Applies a more readable font throughout the website, improving readability.

Underlines links throughout the website, making them easier to distinguish.

Adjusts the font size for improved readability.

Visuals

Reduces animations and disables autoplaying videos across the website, reducing distractions and improving focus.

Reduces the colour saturation throughout the website to create a more soothing visual experience.

Increases the contrast of elements on the website, making text and interface elements easier to distinguish.