The Star Malaysia - Star2

American Assassin

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(★★✩✩✩)

WHAT role does emotion play in violence? This is the rather high-minded philosophi­cal question at the core of the rather schlocky spy picture American Assassin though the film itself doesn’t offer any clear answers on that. It’s difficult to puzzle out any morals about what motivates violence and how trauma manifests when the film just leans into more and more numbingly graphic images of human destructio­n.

Directed by Michael Cuesta with an efficient brutality, based on the book by Vince Flynn, with a script by Stephen Schiff, Michael Finch, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, American Assassin is like if the evening news threw up on a screenplay, or if every current event coalesced into a single nightmare.

It starts with a mass shooting, involves plenty of explicit torture, and ends with Navy destroyers in peril and nuclear bombs in play. Escapist, American Assassin is not.

The scrappily appealing Teen Wolf and Maze Runner star Dylan O’Brien stars as Mitch Rapp, a young man who loses everything in a terrorist attack and becomes hellbent on seeking revenge. The first third of the film, in which he poses as an American extremist in order to infiltrate a terror cell, is rather fascinatin­g, a portrait of reckless young male energy channelled in all the wrong ways for all the right reasons.

But soon, Mitch has been intercepte­d and recruited to the CIA, where he is taken to a top-secret, unlicensed training camp marshalled by special forces trainer Stan Hurley (an off-leash Michael Keaton). There, he moulds his charges into killing machines via brutal bouts of fisticuffs in the woods, virtual reality taser shootouts, and extremely aggro macho posturing.

Though moral questions tumble around American Assassin, the film itself relies on so many cliches it can never be trusted to give a truly profound statement. Starting with a classic “dead wife” home video, the film proceeds through training montages and Bourne Identity-style European ops missions, complete with a female comrade, Annika (Shiva Negar) to do the requisite empathy and gentle wound dabbing that’s so completely hackneyed by this point. Watching O’Brien violently waterboard her later is not an effective way to upend any female stereotype­s.

Ultimately, American Assassin proves to be yet another example of Hollywood’s continued valorisati­on and legitimati­on of psychopath­ic men, murderers who are presented here as heroes doing official government work.

It’s what American Assassin reflects about the American culture that is far more chilling than anything in the story itself. – Katie Walsh/Tribune News Service

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