Respond to these rapid questions in our American Assassin quiz and we will tell you which American Assassin character you are. Play it now.
While “American Assassin” is an action film, it is also a suspenseful spy thriller, a meditation on revenge, and a story about mentors and pupils. But, above all, it is a film that enjoys maiming and killing people and does so exceptionally well. After losing his parents in a car accident as a child, Mitch Rapp fails to save the life of his fiancee during a terrorist attack and swears that he will track down and execute the leader of the cell that ordered the attack. Dylan O’Brien plays Mitch Rapp. CIA assassin Stan Hurley trains Mitch, a Cold War veteran and former Navy SEAL, to assassinate high-ranking officials in the United States (Michael Keaton). Once Ghost (Taylor Kitsch), one of Hurley’s former trainees, enters the picture, things start to get a little more complicated.
I’m not just referring to the plot; I’m referring to the movie’s overall purpose. Mitch and his colleagues kill terrorists and other bad guys with guns, knives, their hands and feet, cars and trucks, and everyday household tools in ways that their manufacturers never intended. Once you figure out where the film’s heart is, it doesn’t take long to realize that it would’ve been more honest if it had embraced that impulse from the beginning.
Despite his small stature and wiry build, O’Brien is an effective strong-silent action hero. One of those gloomy outsiders who has no regard for authority but performs so admirably that his superiors (including Sanaa Lathan, who is mostly wasted as CIA Deputy Director Irene Kennedy) continue to indulge his hunches and to forgive his excesses despite their disapproval of him. The first half hour of the film is marked by a cool and assured tone and style, but after that, the film begins to lose its way. In a condensed, frequently wordless opening section, Mitch communicates his homicidal tunnel-vision through training montages, encrypted online exchanges with terrorist recruiters, and closeups of his grief-stricken eyes, among other techniques.
Eventually, however, the film transforms him into a stubbly, butt-kicking ingenue who is defined primarily by smart-a$$ quips and astonishing physicality (kudos to Cuesta for keeping the camera far enough back to show that O’Brien is performing many of his own stunts). Despite the fact that there are hints of chemistry between Mitch and a Turkish agent (Shiva Negar’s Annika), who is allied with Stan’s unit, the film isn’t built for that kind of interaction. Friends in action films are frequently there to die and be avenged, and grief is frequently expressed rather than explored. That is also the case in this instance.
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American Assassin Quiz
Throughout the second hour, Mitch is a potentially lethal bystander to his own story. This section is heavy on the theme of vengeance, with multiple characters enacting their own versions of Mitch’s struggle, but none are well-defined enough to support an ensemble approach; you may feel like you’re getting too much of every major character while also not getting enough of them, and that the philosophical inquiry into the idea of revenge has been layered onto the screenplay to make it feel more like a thoughtful statement rather than a bloody lark instead. Neben Mitch and Ghost, we keep meeting supporting characters who harbor murderous grudges against other people, including politicians in their own government, and sometimes against entire nations and ethnic groups, as well as against each other. A group of disgruntled Iranian officials and military officers wants to build a nuclear weapon using Ghost-supplied materials in order to exact revenge on the faction that forced them from power in the first place. These individuals also seek vengeance against the United States and Israel in order to atone for past wrongs (Ghost tells an Iranian high-muckety-muck that once they conclude their deal, “you can kill as many Jews as you want”).
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“American Assassin” appears to want us to believe that it is a film set on the planet Earth at times. Thriller fans may be reminded of John Frankenheimer’s bracingly nasty R-rated thrillers, particularly “Black Sunday,” which revolved around the Mossad and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and starred Bruce Dern as a disillusioned veteran who, like Ghost, wants to punish America for disfiguring his body and spirit. As well as references to “Day of the Jackal,” “Munich,” and an obscure 1980s film called “The Amateur,” which follows a CIA researcher (John Savage) who persuades the agency to train him to kill so he can avenge his wife’s murder by terrorists by training as a CIA operative. The script makes use of real-life geopolitical rivals, terrorist organizations, and political events to make its points. There are also references to the post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi government, Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal, in addition to Iran and Israel.
The film, however, makes it clear by the end that it is disgruntled mavericks who are the ones who are causing the immediate problems. In storytelling, this is an example of the “one bad apple” approach, which is intended to provide rhetorical cover for movie studios in the event that anyone attempts to protest the film or prevent it from being exported to their country.
About the quiz
“The Interrogation,” “The November Man,” and “Hitman: Agent 47” writer Michael Finch is credited with writing the screenplay, as is the writing team of Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, who have previously worked on “The Siege” (about a terrorist attack that results in New York being quarantined) and “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.” The film is directed by Marshall Herskovitz, who is also credited with writing the screenplay. In this case, the director is Michael Cuesta, who is perhaps best known for his work on Showtime’s “Homeland,” a series that blends geopolitical specificity with melodrama and portrays much of the Middle East as a brown menace even as it insists the situation is more complicated than that. When Ghost compares himself and Mitch to monsters that were created by the military-industrial complex to suffocate designated enemies but turned on their creators instead, the movie conjures up images of the Bourne saga. However, it never manages to pull off the magic trick that made the first three Bourne films (which, in retrospect, seem increasingly miraculous) feel devoid of contradictions.
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The cast does the best they can with material that frequently confuses exposition with psychological analysis. Only Michael Keaton, who has been in the business for four decades and can bring life to even the most dreary of films, is capable of creating an emotionally cohesive and memorable character. Is there another current star who does a better job of gaining the support of the audience from the very beginning and keeping it there no matter what happens? He’s a skinny leatherneck in this film, a middle-aged machismo fantasy for a business-class dad, and his Jimmy Cagney defiance earns the film’s only thunderous applause (you’ll know the moment when you see it, trust me). Throughout, Keaton keeps injecting life into lines that should have been dead on arrival by inserting unexpected pauses into his responses to questions and looking around the room at people and objects, leaving you wondering if Stan is hiding something. Possibly he is privy to a secret: that “American Assassin” is not what it purports to be, and that both he and the audience will have a more satisfying experience if they pretend that he is in the movie that should have been made instead.
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