Review: American Assassin

Dylan O’Brien plays Mitch, who loses his girlfriend to a bloody terrorist attack whilst holidaying in Spain. The poor guy had only just proposed, too. We immediately jump to a year and a half later and now Mitch is full of ideas of furious vengeance. Having tracked down the terrorists responsible, he finds that the problem is taken out of his hands by the CIA, who then offer him a job. Recruited by Sanaa Lathan’s CIA bigwig, he will join an elite squad of covert operatives to be trained under gruff Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton). Eventually things lead to a plot about Iranian terrorists supposedly working on building a nuclear device. Scott Adkins plays one of the other recruits, Taylor Kitsch plays a former agent now gone rogue, David Suchet is Lathan’s superior in the CIA, and Shiva Negar plays a female recruit.

In a perfect world, Scott Adkins would already be the biggest action star on the planet. He’s got the looks, the martial arts skills, he can speak English coherently and relatively expressively, and although now around 40 years of age, he’s still young enough to pull the action hero thing off on-screen. Since we live in this world, Vin Diesel and Scarlett Johansson are our A-movie action heroes, whilst Adkins gets to star in C-grade action movies and play fourth-tier supporting roles in wider releases like this 2017 film from director Michael Cuesta (the average “Tell-Tale”, the solid “Kill the Messenger”). Our hero in this is Dylan O’Brien, and frankly he’s miscast in a role that Adkins (perhaps a few years ago) would’ve kicked-arse in. The film is pretty blah to be honest anyway, but O’Brien is a big part of why I didn’t have much fun with this one. If it weren’t for the very fine Michael Keaton, it might’ve been a real slog to get through.

Things start off quite well, with a pretty compelling and violent opener, getting right to some pretty intense action. I’m not crazy about the use of handheld camerawork, but it is what it is at this point I guess. However, 10 minutes in and yeah…I just wasn’t feeling O’Brien. He just didn’t seem like the same guy we saw in the opening scene, and I don’t think O’Brien is any good in the role past that opening scene. It doesn’t help that the filmmakers don’t give us enough of a transition between that opening scene and the hardened, vengeful operative that O’Brien becomes. It’s a pretty big flaw in the screenplay, which actually comes from the pen of four people: Stephen Schiff (Adrian Lyne’s “Lolita”), Michael Finch (“Predators”, “The November Man”), Edward Zwick (the director of “Glory” and “Blood Diamond”), and Marshall Herskovitz (Zwick’s “The Last Samurai”), as well as being an adaptation of a novel by Vince Flynn. The transition just isn’t plausibly written, and whilst O’Brien might think he’s a brooding bad arse, he comes off more like the late, uber-bland himbo Paul Walker. He’s just not right, and it’s amplified by having the much more appropriate (if you excuse his age) Adkins playing a fifth banana to this wannabe Jack Bauer. Hell, Taylor Kitsch is more impressive than O’Brien, essentially playing the other side of the same coin to him (They were presumably cast because they look a bit alike, which isn’t uninteresting). Kitch is sadly underused though as well, David Suchet even more so in a useless role. The plot is frankly very silly and clichéd, like a mixture of “Salt”, “The Accountant”, the Jack Ryan franchise, and a billion other films I could rattle off. Poor Sanaa Lathan in particular looks bored shitless here with the tired plotting. She’s a good actress but unable to make any of this seem plausible or original. Despite a twist or two early on, the events here become more predictable and formulaic towards the climax, as do the characters. The best thing I can say for Adkins here is that he gets a reasonable amount of screen time…for the first 40 minutes whereupon he leaves the picture entirely. He also doesn’t get a damn thing to do in those 40 minutes.

The film is utterly ordinary and the only things keeping you awake are the violence (there’s a lot of gunfire in this) and Michael Keaton. Keaton’s admittedly not the first actor I’d think of for his role- Kurt Russell, Dolph Lundgren, Mel Gibson, Stephen Lang, and Dwayne Johnson would all come to mind first for me. However, he’s the only really legit actor this thing has, and while perhaps a tad old for the part, he nonetheless works in it. The action is perfectly fine, if a bit “Jason Bourne” for my liking and not frequent enough.

A more appropriate and charismatic lead actor would not have saved this predictable and silly film, but it certainly would’ve improved it somewhat. It’s dull, despite fine work by Michael Keaton. Scott Adkins continues to be poorly used by mainstream Hollywood.

Rating: C