Taking out foreign terrorists in the overworked US way
Slick and more than a little repellent, “American Assassin” packages terrorism, and how to deal with it, the way American audiences seem to want it these days, with the Americafirst branding right there in the title for patriotic assurance.
It’s an adaptation of the 2010 Vince Flynn novel, one in a series of 13 he wrote before his 2013 death of prostate cancer at age 47. (Author Kyle Mills has picked up the series since then.) The bestselling action books predate 9/11, but 9/11 and its globally destabilizing aftermath have only helped their ongoing popularity.
Flynn’s creation is charismatic loner Mitch Rapp, an undercover, off-thebooks CIA counterterrorism expert.
“American Assassin” tells Rapp’s origin story. In the novel, the 1988 Pan Am Lockerbie terrorist attack served as the narrative hook for a series of revenge killings. The movie ditches that in favor of a different, fictional prologue, inspired (if that’s the right word) by the 2015 terrorist attack in Tunisia that left 38 beachgoers dead.
Rapp’s portrayed by leading actor Dylan O’Brien, graduate of “The Maze Runner” and, therefore, well-versed in henley T-shirt acting. He and his girlfriend (Charlotte Vega, a corpse in a bikini before you know it) are vacationing on the island of Ibiza. Mitch springs a marriage proposal. It’s love, all right. Then, seconds later, it’s death, as swarthy men with machine guns wipe out half the tourists, lingering sadistically over Mitch’s intended before snuffing her out with extra relish.
The rest of the movie makes those bad men pay, and many other bad men like them. Mitch, orphaned as a teenager, becomes a laser-focused vengeance bot, recruited by the CIA and trained by a crusty mentor (Michael Keaton, having some fun in a Bruce Willis-y role) to ferret out an enemy op known only as “Ghost.” Skipping from Manchester, England, to Rome to Istanbul, “American Assassin” stops off for a shootout here, a torture sequence there, en route to a climactic apocalypse involving nukes, the U.S. Navy, a tsunami of sorts and seething insults traded between the hero rogue and the villain rogue, played by Taylor Kitsch. It’s Spy vs. Spy, Hunk vs. Hunk division.
The international cast should help it click overseas, where all the real money gets made these days. Shiva Negar plays a Turkish agent who teams up with Rapp. Now and then the script acknowledges the murky geopolitical alliances inherent in early 21st-century intelligence. But mainly it’s focused on corpses, jihadists, American fury and the same old, same old. In the wondrously generic role of the CIA deputy director, aka Ms. Exposition, Sanaa Lathan does all she can to enliven scenes the audience could write en masse in real time.
Keaton lends the movie some class. The movie takes care of an action audience’s basic needs. But it’s one of those not-bad experiences I ended up resisting to its core.
Is it a matter of what Dylan O’Brien alluded to in a recent Metro.co.uk interview, regarding the film’s terrorist-porn tendencies being “too much” or “too current, too soon”? Maybe. But even without the last two or three international terrorism incidents, the material here feels so worked over and recycled, it’s like a two-hour pilot for a forgettable one-season series. Despite the actors hired to deliver the story, the superassassin of “American Assassin” isn’t quite human. He’s just revenge in a henley T.