AMERICAN ASSASSIN

H1/2 R, 111 minutes. Through tonight only at Niantic. Still playing at Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. 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 jihadi in order to infiltrate a terror cell, is rather fascinating, a portrait of reckless young male energy channeled 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 molds his charges into killing machines via brutal bouts of fisticuffs in the woods, virtual reality taser shootouts, and extremely aggro macho posturing. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

BRAD’S STATUS

R, 101 minutes. Mystic Luxury Cinemas. The writer, director and actor Mike White has a knack for telling stories about the chasm between what people really want and who they really are. His sweet-and-sour satires are minefields of personal disappointment, bitterness and despair, littered with the wreckage of broken promises and unmet expectations. The characters who populate them, from the animal-loving loner played by Molly Shannon in “Year of the Dog” to Laura Dern’s post-rehab whistle-blower on the HBO series “Enlightened,” are typically dismissed as society’s weirdos and losers. Brad