Robot-like thriller is paint-by-numbers payback
Michael Keaton’s spy-coach character in American Assassin neatly sums up the plot. “Some bad people are planning to do bad things,” he tells a new CIA recruit. “It’s our job to stop them.”
Is that a cynical twinkle in Keaton’s eyes? So generic is this film, drawn from the vast pulp output of thriller scribbler Vince Flynn, it offers a glimpse into a dazzling future when robots begin making movies.
Director Michael Cuesta ( Kill the Messenger) knows how to competently stage a fight scene or car chase, but making us buy into this committee-written screenplay and its twodimensional characters is a feat that eludes him. This is no small achievement when you consider the realworld resonance of a story about crazy people seeking access to nuclear weapons.
It begins well enough, with aforementioned CIA recruit Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’Brien, The Maze Runner), seen at age 23, in sunnier days. He’s enjoying a beach vacation in Spain with his lovely blond girlfriend Katrina (Charlotte Vega), whom he proposes to and Snapchats while they swim the waves.
No sooner does she say “yes” than the camera picks up a more shocking engagement: armed thugs sent by global terrorist Adnan Al-Mansur (Shahid Ahmed) begin machinegunning the sun worshippers, Katrina among them.
Jump to 18 months later, and emotionally shattered Rapp has pulled the pieces together and found himself a new man, one with a bolder mission than matrimony: payback.
Newly ripped and raging, he’s taught himself guns and martial arts, learned fluent Arabic, grown a beard and lost any sense of humour he might have possessed. Not bad for a kid who’s barely old enough to vote and legally drink.
Rapp’s ready to go after Al-Mansur as the proverbial one-man killing machine on a globe-trotting rampage, but eavesdropping CIA deputy chief Irene Kennedy (Sanaa Lathan) has other ideas: she wants him to join her world-saving posse to halt a rogue nuke plot, and she’s not asking.
Mitch is placed in the rough hands of Keaton’s Stan Hurley, a former Navy SEAL and Gulf War fighter who is now tasked with making government-sanctioned black-ops killers out of angry loners like Rapp.
Hurley loves his work — he barks out tough-guy slogans and awakens recruits with gunfire — but his devoted teaching doesn’t always achieve the desired results. One of his previous star students (Taylor Kitsch) has crossed over to the even darker side, by selling nuke-ready plutonium in various shady deals across Europe. No wonder people call him “Ghost.”
You can bet this isn’t the last we’ve heard of Ghost, as Rapp, Hurley and accomplices Victor (Scott Adkins) and Annika (Shiva Negar) set out to bust heads and righteously protect the planet, not to exact cheap revenge — although you’ll have to get back to Rapp on that.
Maybe he’ll be seeking payback again after this weekend’s box-office grosses trickle in. At least Keaton seems to be enjoying himself.