‘Assassin’ misses the mark
“American Assassin,” an action thriller based on a 2010 book by “24” consultant Vince Flynn, is no “American Sniper.” It’s a low-rent “Jason Bourne” about Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’Brien, “Teen Wolf”), a young American whose beautiful, bikini-clad fiancee, Katrina (Charlotte Vega), to whom he has just proposed via selfie cam on a beach in Ibiza, is shot to death by Muslim terrorists.
Not long after, vengeful Mitch manages to get into the same room in Libya as Mansur (Shahid Ahmed), a terrorist fiercely hunted by the U.S. government. After being pulled out by a SEAL team, Mitch is recruited by CIA honcho Irene Kennedy (talented Sanaa Lathan in a weak tea version of the Joan Allen role) and sent to be trained in a blackop-arts program codenamed Orion by legendary Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton), a seeming madman living with his dog and guns in the deep woods of Roanoke, Va.
Stan likes shooting pistols off near the heads of his trainees and telling them they’re all dead. Will Mitch, who must learn not to make things “personal,” make the cut? In one unintentionally funny sequence, Mitch and fellow recruits are sent into a virtual reality world wearing hot-wired vests that shock them every time they shoot the wrong person. Mitch seems to like it. Good doggie.
Soon, Mitch, Stan, Kennedy and Annika (Shiva Negar), a beautiful agent from Iran, are in Istanbul trying to track down “15 kilos of weapons-grade plutonium” before an American rogue lunatic nicknamed Ghost (Taylor Kitsch), who was another “son” trained by crazy Stan, can sell the plutonium to someone (Perhaps those sneaky Iranians whom Ghost meets?), who can make a nuke and start World War III. If “American Assassin” were a better movie, you might care what happens. It isn’t.
Director Michael Cuesta has eight episodes of TV’s “Homeland” to his credit, if you want to call it that. But he seems unsuited to the “Jason Bourne” serieslike demands of “American Assassin.” Maybe it is because the characters in the film speak in gung-ho CIA action-film cliches and worse. Or maybe it was that I never figured out what Ghost’s beef was. The fight and, especially, chase scenes are second-rate. Londonborn David Suchet sports an impressive American accent as CIA Director Stansfield. But his skills are wasted in this.
Keaton is always fun to watch, even when he’s getting his fingernails pulled off with pliers or hooked up to the power grid. But not even he can do much with dialogue so canned it should be labeled Spamspeak, and it’s getting tiresome watching the talented Kitsch in bad movies. As the junior James Bond figure, O’Brien certainly is driven and athletic. But his one-note performance is devoid of charisma or charm. “American Assassin 2”? No, thank you.
(“American Assassin” contains extreme violence, profanity and terrorist movie cliches.)