American Assassin (2017)
After the death of his girlfriend at the hands of
Islamic terrorists, Mitch Rapp is drawn into the world of
counter-terrorism, mentored by tough-as-nails former U.S. Navy SEAL Stan
Hurley.
Director:
Michael CuestaStars:
Twenty three-year-old Mitch lost his parents to a tragic car accident at
the age of fourteen, and his girlfriend to a terrorist attack just as
they were engaged. Seeking revenge, he is enlisted by CIA Deputy
Director Irene Kennedy as a black ops recruit. Kennedy then assigns Cold
War veteran Stan Hurley to train Mitch. Together they will later on
investigate a wave of apparently random attacks on military and civilian
targets. The discovery of a pattern in the violence leads them to a
joint mission with a lethal Turkish agent to stop a mysterious operative
intent on starting a world war in the Middle East.
Country:
USARelease Date:
15 September 2017 (USA) See more »Also Known As:
Asesino: Misión Venganza See more »Box Office
Budget:
$33,000,000 (estimated)Opening Weekend:
AUD 1,223,340 (Australia) (17 September 2017)Gross:
$26,185,076 (USA) (24 September 2017)
See more »
Company Credits
Technical Specs
Runtime:
Sound Mix:
Dolby AtmosColor:
ColorAspect Ratio:
2.35 : 1Did You Know?
Trivia
Jeffrey Nachmanoff and Edward Zwick were also attached as director when movie was in production stage, back in 2012.Goofs
Towards the end of the movie the villain escapes on a speedboat out to
sea but the main scene has been taking place in Rome which is forty
miles from the coast.
"American Assassin" is an action film, a spy thriller, a meditation
on revenge, and a story about mentors and pupils, but mostly it's a
movie that loves to maim and kill people and is very good at it. Dylan O'Brien
stars as Mitch Rapp, an American who loses his parents in a car wreck
as a child, then fails to save his fiancee from a terrorist attack and
vows to find and execute the head of the cell that ordered it. Mitch
gets pulled into the CIA, where he's trained as an assassin by Cold War
veteran and former Navy S.E.A.L. Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton). Then one of Hurley's former trainees, an arms dealer known as Ghost (Taylor Kitsch), enters the picture, and things get murky.
I don't just mean the plot, I mean the movie's reason for being.
"American Assassin" keeps telling you that revenge poisons the soul and
is generally a bad idea while serving up awesome scenes of Mitch and
colleagues killing terrorists and other bad guys with guns, knives,
their hands and feet, cars and trucks, and household tools used in ways
that their manufacturers never envisioned. It doesn't take long to
figure out where the film's heart lies, and it would've been more honest
if it had embraced that impulse from the start.
Though slight
and wiry, O'Brien makes an effective strong-silent action hero. He's one
of those morose outsiders who has no respect for authority but does his
job so well that his superiors (including Sanaa Lathan,
mostly wasted as CIA Deputy Director Irene Kennedy) keep indulging his
hunches and forgiving his excesses. The tone and style are cool and
assured for the first-half hour, but the movie loses its way after that.
A tight, often wordless opening section lets Mitch communicate his
homicidal tunnel-vision through training montages, encrypted online
exchanges with terrorist recruiters, and closeups of his grief-stricken
eyes.
But then the movie turns him into a stubbly, butt-kicking
ingenue, defined mainly by smart-ass quips and astonishing physicality
(kudos to Cuesta for keeping the camera far back enough to show that
O'Brien is doing a lot of his own stunts). Although there are hints of
chemistry between Mitch and a Turkish agent (Shiva Negar's Annika)
allied with Stan's unit, the movie's not built for that sort of thing.
Mates in action films often exist to die and be avenged, and grief is
more often asserted than explored. That's the case here, too.
Mitch is a lethal bystander to his own story throughout the
second hour. Vengeance comes up a lot during this section, with
multiple characters enacting their own version of Mitch's struggle, but
none are well-defined enough to support an ensemble approach; you may
simultaneously feel you're getting too much of every major character
but also not enough, and that the philosophical inquiry into the idea
of revenge has been layered onto the screenplay to make it feel like a
thoughtful statement instead of a bloody lark. Besides Mitch and Ghost,
we keep meeting supporting characters who hold murderous grudges
against other people, against politicians in their own government,
sometimes against entire nations and ethnic groups. A band of
disgruntled Iranian officials and military officers want to build a
nuclear weapon with material supplied by Ghost to get revenge against
the faction that drove them from power. These folks also want revenge
against United States and Israel to repay old indignities (Ghost tells
an Iranian high-muckety-muck that once they conclude their deal, "you
can kill as many Jews as you want").
"American Assassin"
sometimes seems to want us to think it's an earthbound film. At some
points, thriller buffs might be reminded of John Frankenheimer's
bracingly nasty R-rated thrillers—in particular "Black Sunday," which
revolved around the Mossad and the PLO, and costarred Bruce Dern
as a disillusioned veteran who, like Ghost, wants to punish America
for disfiguring his body and spirit. There are also traces of "Day of
the Jackal" and "Munich" and an obscure 1980s film called "The Amateur," about a CIA researcher (John Savage)
who convinces the agency to train him to kill so he can avenge his
wife's murder by terrorists. The script name-checks real life
geopolitical rivals, terrorist groups, and political events. Besides
Iran and Israel, there are references to the post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi
government, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Obama administration's Iran deal.
But
by the end, the film makes it clear that it's disgruntled mavericks
who are creating the immediate problems. This is the "one bad apple"
approach to storytelling that's meant to provide rhetorical cover for
movie studios, should anyone try to protest the film or stop it from
being exported to their country.
The screenplay is credited to four people: Stephen Schiff, currently a writer on FX's "The Americans"; Michael Finch of "The Interrogation," "The November Man" and "Hitman: Agent 47"; and Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, a team whose credits include "The Siege" (about a terrorist attack that leads to New York being quarantined) and "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back." The director is Michael Cuesta,
perhaps best known for his work on Showtime's "Homeland," a series
that mixes geopolitical specificity and melodrama, and treats much of
the Middle East as a brown menace even as it insists things are more
complicated than that. The movie summons the ghosts of the Bourne saga
when Ghost compares himself and Mitch to monsters that were created by
the military-industrial complex to snuff out designated enemies but
turned on their creators instead. But it never pulls off the magic act
that made the first three Bourne films (which seem increasingly
miraculous in retrospect) feel contradiction-free.
The cast does the best it can with material that too often mistakes
exposition for psychology. Only Michael Keaton, who's been acting for
four decades and livens up even the worst films, manages to build an
emotionally cohesive, memorable character. Is there another current star
who's better at getting the audience on his side from frame one and
keeping it there no matter what? He's a skinny leatherneck here, a
business class dad's fantasy of middle-aged machismo, and his Jimmy
Cagney defiance earns the film's only thunderous cheer (you'll know the
moment when you see it). Throughout, Keaton keeps making lines that
should've been dead on arrival pulse with life by inserting surprising
pauses into his responses to questions and glancing furtively at people
and objects, so that you keep wondering if Stan knows a secret. Maybe he
does know a secret: that "American Assassin" is not what it pretends to
be, and both he and the audience will have a more satisfying experience
if he pretends he's in the movie that should've been.
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