Went to see the new film American Assassin and I shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t, no one should. This is an upjumped B movie, a direct-to-video film that convinced someone to go theatrical and have a good budget. It’s a lousy, generic film with bad acting and terrible and predictable bad dialog. Thing is, it’s getting bad reviews but the reviewers seem to not hate it as much as I did.
Basic premise, an average, everyday young man survives a terrorist shooting on a beach. His fiance is killed in the attack so he decides, in eighteen months, to become a badass killing machine. He becomes an expert at all types of guns, knives, boxing, kung-fu. He learns Farsi and becomes an expert in the Quran and Islam. He grows a big terrorist beard and talks his way into a terrorist cell with his Islamic expert knowledge. This guy is so good at everything, the CIA (who is spying on him) doesn’t want him as a normal spook. No, they want to recruit him for a double-secret handshake undercover organization. He’s the perfect recruit because he’s just so perfect and has no prior military experience to “unlearn”.
Our main character is so good at everything he’s basically a Gary Sue. He’s also insufferable smug when he managed to have any personality. But he’s generally personality-free… and back-story free. The only thing we know about this blank wall is that his girlfriend died and he mad. A wheel of cheese would impress me more.
Then there’s the movie’s dialog. It’s cheesy and one-note generic tough guy stuff. It doesn’t have any flair, creativity, or nuance so it just comes across dated and corny. Nothing wrong with tough-guy dialog but you have to punch it up just a little.
Michael Keaton got roped into this and he’s got some of the worst dialog. Dialog so bad that even he – a very convincing and charismatic actor – can’t pull it off without making me laugh. Yes, Keaton pulls off a terrible performance. Not that anyone’s acting is particularly good. The marble statue hero and villain (played by Tayrlor Kitsch) can’t be bothered to try.
I’m not the kind of guy who automatically reacts negatively when American films have *gasp* Islamic terrorists bad guys. They have plenty of movies with other kinds of bad guys too and it’s not like radicals aren’t out there blowing stuff up. But something about this film felt distastefully rah-rah white-man-superhero-spy-killed-all-the-guys-with-the-beards Team America to me. Like it’s catering to our worst perceptions of how the world should work.
Look, I hated sitting through this whole movie so maybe I’m being extra uncharitable. It’s possible it’s not THAT bad but something about it set me off. It’s just a wannabe imitator of better spy movies. It has high ambitions and doesn’t pull of any of them. Maybe you’ll like it if you aren’t as critical or judgmental as me and just want an action spy flick to pass the time between better action spy flicks.
Score: 56