In Neal Stephenson’s seminal cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, he sums up the young male experience thusly: “Until a man is 25, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world.” American Assassin follows this maxim to the letter. According to the film, those circumstances are 1) your girlfriend must be killed by terrorists on a beach moments after you propose to her, 2) you spend 18 months learning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and 3) you become fluent in Arabic to become a one-man Jihad-ending force. Seriously, that is the plot to this movie.
American Assassin is the first in a proposed series of films based on Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp books, the kind of Clancy-esque page turners you’re likely to find in the checkout aisle of a grocery store. While the series is infamous for it’s hard-nosed, extremist protagonist – à la Jack Reacher – the studio has chosen to adapt a late-coming prequel in the canon, so they can cast a young actor to grow into the grizzled veteran as the franchise progresses. The issue isn’t that they’ve chosen The Maze Runner‘s Dylan O’Brien to portray a college aged Mitch at the dawn of his fruitful terrorist killing career. It’s that, as an origin story, American Assassin presents a protagonist who, within 15 minutes of the film’s opening, is already an unassailable, fully formed machine who undergoes zero growth throughout the rest of the picture.
The film’s first third reads like self-insert fanfiction for every Rainbow Six-playing edgelord who truly believes, given the necessary tragic motivation, they could be an unstoppable instrument of patriotism and justice. We meet Mitch proposing to his girlfriend right before she’s murdered by terrorists and hard cut to a year and a half later where he’s a proficient hand to hand fighter with so much knowledge of Islam he schools a jihadist about the Quran. Mitch, from the outset, is not an actual action film hero. He’s a Mary Sue for people who were sexually aroused by 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. This would be a fine starting point for a narrative arc if the film was about how one man can’t wage a one-man war against terrorism. If he got in over his head infiltrating cells and needed to be retrained by professional counterterrorist agents and learn the value of duty over the petty pursuit of revenge, that would be an interesting film.
Instead, Mitch is recruited by Sanaa Lathan’s boring CIA Deputy character Irene Kennedy and sent to a secret, special training camp in the woods to learn from Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton), a man who doesn’t train spies or special ops. He trains warriors. The middle section, ideally, would be Hurley breaking Mitch down before building him back up, but he almost immediately has to concede that Mitch, on his own, in 18 fucking months, is already a master. The film shows us this by having Mitch choke out actor Scott Adkins as Victor, the other tough guy star student in the class. It’s a scene that provides nothing other than the satisfaction of the wiry, weirdo who decided he could be Batman besting a man presented as a career military guy at his own game. To run this video game like fantasy home, director Michael Cuesta regularly intercuts over the shoulder POV shots of Mitch, with Mitch’s eye level directly at the characters he interacts with, so it feels like they’re addressing the viewer and not the hero. It’s meant to be immersive, but it just reduces Every Character Not Named Mitch into glorified NPCs.
Even when Mitch makes it into the field on a mission to stop Iranians from getting their hands on a Nuke and the film’s villain is revealed to be an operative known only as “Ghost” (Taylor Kitsch), an evil, older version of himself also trained by Hurley, the film fails to force our hero to learn or change anything about himself. Ghost is obviously a cautionary tale for what will end up happening if Mitch never learns that his crusade will not work if it’s mired in his quest for revenge, but Mitch never has to come to that crossroads. He’s repeatedly rewarded by the plot for disobeying orders and being a stubborn, irritating little shit.
If the film has a saving grace, it’s Michael Keaton as Hurley. He’s the only character in the movie who makes any sense. He’s constantly providing criticism of both the hero and the villain for having weak, rote motivations and flaws, while the film around them continues to glorify their exploits. His usual manic energy and crotchety over-it-ness regularly steal the show here, even if he’s one of the first mentor figures in recent mainstream movie history to give up on teaching his student anything at all very early on.
If the filmmakers behind this franchise pilot really wanted to tell a story that would fundamentally grow Mitch as a protagonist worth following from summer to summer, the narrative path would not be a difficult one. But given that they chose to craft an origin story that is crystallized in the opening moments, then dragged out for two hours, there’s little hope any subsequent sequels will do any heavier lifting either. American Assassin promises a series of middling to decent actioners that serve as little more than torture porn for xenophobes and nationalists who get their rocks off fantasizing about killing brown people. Maybe that’s what some audiences really want, but couldn’t they at least make an attempt to hide it?
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