Directed by: Michael Cuesta
Starring: Dylan O' Brien, Michael Keaton, Sanaa Latham, Taylor Kitsch, David Suchet
It didn't take long to realize American Assassin is a live-action video game. Your avatar in Call of Duty has more personality than the hero of this film, an angry, revenge-driven young man named Mitch Rapp (O' Brien) who joins the CIA in order to avenge the shooting death of his fiancée by terrorists. His brief happiness over his engagement ends quickly when terrorists start shooting up the beach and mortally wounding his beautiful fiancée. After that, Mitch becomes a vengeful killing machine who may as well be a Terminator.
Fast forward to a mere eighteen months later, Mitch initially goes after the terrorist cell on his own by posing as a Jihadist sympathizer, but when he is captured and seconds away from being shot, the CIA swoops him and offs the cell. Yet, the CIA Deputy Director, Irene Kennedy (Latham) is impressed with his resourcefulness in infiltrating the cell and sets him up for training with former Navy SEAL Stan Hurley (Keaton), who speaks in his best Dirty Harry voice while making life miserable for Mitch. That's his job, to trip him up, but Mitch doesn't seem to trip up easily. In a matter of days, Mitch, Stan, and others are off to Turkey to track a rogue CIA agent known as Ghost (Kitsch), who is planning to steal a nuclear warhead for his own malicious reasons. Stan once trained Ghost, so the mission is personal for him, while Mitch can use the mission as an excuse to defy authority and keep chasing and killing bad guys.
You can guess what happens and how it all turns out, which is to be expected in a film like this, but I couldn't help but notice how lifeless the movie is at its core. Mitch's reasons for wanting to kill bad guys are understandable, but doesn't make us care about him anymore. There are many actors I envision playing a gruff, seen-it-all, cynical CIA trainer, but Michael Keaton isn't among them. I know he played Batman once, but Keaton doesn't fit as an action hero. His skills are more verbal and displaying unique, quick intelligence, not going mano y mano with nameless henchmen.
O' Brien is a strong, silent type who doesn't possess the charisma of action stars like Schwarzenegger, Eastwood, or heck even Michael Keaton.
American Assassin has straight-to-on demand all over it, but it found a distributor and made its way into theaters this past summer. The movie is a big shoot 'em up, with bullets and bodies flying around at a dizzying pace, but we don't see anything original. It is by-the-numbers, lacking wit and inspiration. We've seen enough action films like American Assassin to know we don't need to see another one, but more will be made, so when they are they should be made with a reason to root for the good guys other than the fact that they aren't terrorists.
No comments:
Post a Comment