American Assassin review: Michael Keaton's cynical, sadistic thriller is about as much fun as an angry wasp
Dir: Michael Cuesta; Starring: Dylan O’Brien, Michael Keaton, Sanaa Lathan, Taylor Kitsch, Shiva Negar. 18 cert, 112 mins.
"The enemy dresses like a deer and kills like a lion,” screams Michael Keaton in American Assassin – a spy thriller which both behaves like and is about as much fun to spend time with as an angry wasp. Keaton plays the leader of a CIA black ops squad which specialises in turning isolated, damaged young men who feel they have nothing to lose into pitiless killers, as part of the struggle against Islamist terror. (Call it the ‘if you can’t beat ‘em…’ approach.)
His boot camp takes place out in the wind-torn wilderness, his recruits scrapping in the mud while Keaton yells insults, swings punches, and occasionally fires a gun beside their ear. It looks less like special forces training than a game of Twister for survivalist fruit-loops.
The star pupil is Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’Brien), a young man whose fiancée was mown down by a cell of machine-gun-toting jihadis on an Ibiza beach 18 months previously, all of two minutes after the poor guy proposed. This attack – presumably inspired by the mass shooting at a Tunisian resort in 2015 – serves as the film’s opening sequence, and quickly sketches out the film’s endlessly depressing worldview that every crowd of civilians is basically a massacre-in-waiting, and how exciting is that?
Mitch pops to the bar to grab some celebratory drinks, and then the carnage unfolds, complete with crowds of extras gently jogging for cover, digital plumes of gore, and bullets that leave Saving Private Ryan trails of bubbles behind them as they slice through the swimming pool.
The scene is executed with such flippant sadism that the Spielberg steal feels doubly outrageous, and it quickly becomes one of the most counterproductive grabs for audience sympathy I think I’ve ever seen. When a film begins this cynically, who cares where it goes next?
Well, obviously, it’s bloodthirsty revenge. A year and a half on, Mitch has acquired a beard, along with a range of firearm and martial arts skills – and this snags the CIA’s attention, who haul him off to Keaton’s cabin in the woods, and thence across Europe to track down stolen weapons-grade uranium those pesky Middle Eastern types hope to use to spark an all-out nuclear war.
The plot was adapted from the 11th book in a series of 12 about the Mitch Rapp character by the American author Vince Flynn, and is no doubt meant as the first in a series of Bourne-but-stupider adventures.
There’s a tokenistic attempt to waft away some of the macho fug by casting a black actress, Sanaa Lathan, as Mitch’s strait-laced handler, but the film’s gender politics are rather better embodied by the character of the villain’s mistress, who wanders around topless for a bit before being machine-gunned to death on the shag-pile.
In fact, the plot often bends over backwards to give Mitch an excuse to commit extreme violence on attractive young women – one minute he’s shooting one who appears to be heavily pregnant, the next he’s drowning another in a hotel bathtub.
Let’s put it this way: American Assassin seems to have a certain target audience in mind, and it’s probably not one you’d want to be considered a part of.
