SECONDSCREEN
understand and feels excluded by. As the film reaches its midway point it starts to fall horribly apart. Babies are conceived, people die and still the strangers keep coming.
The result is an over-long and structurally repetitious film that might be about narcissism, the creative process or religion but which eventually becomes so unpleasant – and ridiculous – that I couldn’t be bothered to work it out.
Remember Stratton, the awful thriller from a couple of weeks ago about stolen weapons of mass destruction? Well along comes
American Assassin (18) ★★, which is markedly similar and almost as bad. The only real differences being that this time the weapons of mass destruction are nuclear rather biological and our hero is trained by someone from special forces without being special forces himself. Oh, and it’s American, obvs.
It’s not helped by having one of those openings that echoes one of the terrorist horrors of real life – a machine-gun attack on a packed beach akin to the 2015 outrage in Sousse, Tunisia, that left 38 dead – all too realistically.
Having lost his fiancée in the attack, young Mitch Rapp (Maze
Runner and Teen Wolf star Dylan O’Brien) turns himself into a oneman counter-terrorism force. Which suits America’s CIA fine, as they would like Mitch to work for them after he’s been given some more training – from a somewhat improbably cast Michael Keaton.
The result is another over-macho, unpleasantly violent misfire.