You’d think with gifted writers like Stephen Schiff, who wrote
“True Crime” and “Lolita,” Michael Finch who penned “Hitman: Agent 47” and “The
November Man,” and Edward Zwick & Marshall Herskovitz who teamed up for “Defiance”
and “The Last Samurai,” that “American Assassin,” (**1/2 OUT OF ****) with “Maze
Runner” star Dylan O’Brien, would have rivaled the James Bond movies and the
Jason Bourne franchise as an international terrorist thriller. Indeed, a sturdy cast gives their best,
particularly Michael Keaton who radiates throughout, while the youthful O’Brien
has grown up sufficiently so he appears credible as a vengeful adult. Nevertheless, mediocre scripting sabotages “American
Assassin.” The chief problem lies with
its bland hero. Cinematic heroes should
stand out. As the gung-ho, ‘go-out-and-kill-all-terrorists-and-come-back-alive,’
O’Brien is given little with which to forge a charismatic character. Basically,
Mitch Rapp qualifies as an adequate but nondescript hero. The only reason we feel sympathetic toward
him is the tragedy involving his fiancée’s death; this now fuels his every waking
moment. Conversely, as CIA survivalist
specialist Stan Hurley who trains black ops agents, Michael Keaton energizes every
scene with his brazen bravado. You have
fun watching Keaton soak up every second whether he is shooting at an enemy or withstanding
the villain as the latter tortures him. Similarly,
as the evil villain, Taylor Kitsch is almost as captivating as Keaton. Furthermore, he is the best kind of villain
who manages to stay one step ahead of the heroes and keeps surprising us and
them. Adversaries like Keaton’s trainer
and Kitsch’s terrorist make O’Brien’s Mitch Rapp look like crap. Happily, “12 and Holding” director Michael
Cuesta keeps things moving so swiftly that it is possible to overlook the colorless
but driven hero. Little of this ambitious
plot, however, is original. “American
Assassin” appropriates characters and predicaments from earlier movies,
specifically like “Black Sunday” (1977) “The Amateur” (1981), “The Peacemaker”
(1997), and “Munich” (2005) about villains with nuclear warheads.
Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’Brien) is vacationing in sunny Ibiza, Spain,
with his beautiful, blonde, bikini-clad girlfriend Katrina (newcomer Charlotte
Vega) when he surprises her with a marriage proposal. Suddenly, murderous Islamist jihadists
shatter their happiness and shoot everybody in sight. The terrorists wound Mitch twice, and by the
time that he reaches his fiancée, she is dead.
Over a year later, Mitch has learned to defend himself with his bare
hands, practiced enough with firearms until he can obliterate bullseyes, and
learned enough about his Middle-East adversaries so he can infiltrate their
cells. Little does our hero know CIA
Deputy Director Irene Kennedy (Sanaa Lathan of “Love & Basketball”) has had
him under surveillance. Eventually,
Mitch tracks down the monster who orchestrated the bloody Ibiza beach massacre,
Adnan Al-Mansur (Shahid Ahmed of “Syriana”), to Tripoli, Libya. Mitch has just gotten to meet Al-Mansur when
CIA agents charge into the room and blast the terrorists. Mitch watches in horror as Mansur dies from a
shot in the head. This doesn’t keep Mitch from stabbing Al-Mansur’s corpse from
repeatedly until the Americans drag him off the body. The CIA keeps Mitch on ice for 30 days until
Kennedy convinces CIA Director Thomas Stansfield (David Suchet of “Agatha
Christie's Poirot”) to allow Mitch to join the Agency. Initially, former Navy Seal veteran Stan
Hurley (Michael Keaton of “The Founder”) abhors the prospect of training a civilian. Nevertheless, Mitch emerges at the top of his
class, despite all of Hurley’s dirty tricks to run him off. The action comes to boil when the Agency
learns about the theft of weapons grade plutonium from an off-line Russian
nuclear facility. Worse, Hurley
recognizes the thief as an ex-CIA agent, referred to as Ghost (Taylor Kitsch of
“John Carter of Mars”), left behind to die on a mission. Miraculously, Ghost survived and plans to use
the plutonium as payback to construct an atomic bomb. Ghost double-crosses everybody along the way
who helped build the bomb, and CIA don’t discover his plan until it is almost
too late to thwart him.
If you’ve read Vince Flynn’s bestseller, you’ll know director Michael
Cuesta and his writers have scrapped the novel’s plot. Indeed, they have preserved certain scenes,
primarily the boot camp and the torture scenes.
The plot about Stan’s former student Ghost is a figment entirely of the
screenwriters’ imagination. Ghost doesn’t
exist in the novel. Instead of a
saboteur like Ghost in the film, our heroes contend with Middle Eastern regimes
clashing with each other in bombed-out Beirut.
While an entirely different character tortured Stan in the novel, the
villain suffers the same fate as Ghost does in the movie. Letting down his guard momentarily, the
torturer gives Stan the chance to chew off a piece of his ear. Comparably, Flynn dispatched Rapp and Hurley
to Europe to kill an amoral banker who had been managing millions of dollars for
the terrorists as well as Russian espionage agents in Moscow. Further, Mitch’s girlfriend didn’t die on the
beach in Flynn’s novel. Instead, she died
aboard the doomed Pan Am flight 103 that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland. Mind you, sticking Mitch and his fiancée together
on the same beach gives our protagonist greater incentive to embark on a “Death
Wish” style revenge spree since he saw her die.
Obviously, staging the beach massacre was easier than generating a CGI model
of the Pan Am jetliner exploding. The
Mitch in Flynn’s novel didn’t experience his girlfriend’s death first-hand as
his cinematic counterpart. Most of the
last part of the novel occurred in Beirut where terrorists abduct Stan, and
Mitch launches a rescue mission. The
grand finale in the film occurs in the Atlantic, and Ghost is playing for far
higher stakes than his counterparts in the novel. Altogether, Schiff, Finch, Zwick, and Herskovitz
have done an exemplary job of ramping up more larger-than-life derring-do, and
Mitch takes greater initiative in his efforts to carry out his mission. Although competently-made and fast-paced, the
rated-R “American Assassin” is still far too derivative to rank as memorable.
