Embarking on the story with mile-a-minute action, American Assassin manages to introduce Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’ Brien) and his motivations quite quickly in the prologue of the film. An extreme sequences of the film – a horrifying and unexpected terrorist attack on a beach – gives American Assassin a working emotional setting and raw grit that presents it as a decent though hardly new, action revenge movie of the spy style. Most of the time available American Assassin also does not disappoint the viewer and this capability for the most part is provided by the pleasant appearance of Dylan O’Brien in the lead role and several wonderfully small action films directed by Michael Cuesta.
What is left to American Assassin then, faced with the last third of the film, is how much of that momentum, centre of emotion that can support its edifice, is lost. The film seems to bring together all its characters and subplots with the right balance and sense as such, to the extent that it begins to devolve, at a slower but cinematic, in picture-depicting, dragging-clumsily-cliché ridden-overblown and undercut everything that it meticulously built up towards – the spy movie which is comforting in certain ways. It discards a focused, tight, personal character centric approach for a far broader, more impersonal defender type of story it offers as though it has been capable of something beyond what normal people are able to do.
The fact that American Assassin doesn’t throw away all its validity, franchise potential even with those last 30 mins is worth commendation since there was a lot of great work provided before it. For the first to thirds of the motion picture, the film is in such speed and such confidence that it managed to be one of the best rated spy action flicks when it was made with O’Brien establishing once again why he is a name to remember. He assists the movie in maintaining its realistic and grim tone even in the films bigger, occasionally rather comedic parts.
This is a particularly wonderful act for O’Brien as he is given the arduous task of performing all the emotional and action parts of the film, and surprisingly he does precisely that. American Assassin tells a story about a violator that seeks revenge – going to be a CIA hired assassin that stalks terrorists. Actually, this is, in fact, the least of the pulls or most original in the plot of the several American assassin movies. Thanks to the talent of O’Brien and incomparably productive work of Cuesta American Assassin manages to put a fresh take on a rather worn out idea. What the film needed most in order to work was Mitch Rapp being done properly, and luckily he turns out to be interesting enough for the audience to want to follow through the course of the movie.
It’s never a disadvantage to have a professional and dependable performer such as Michael Keaton opposing the likes of O’Brien. The character, played by Scott Caan, is Stan Hurley, who leads the dangerous covert operations unit to which O’Brien is deployed, and yes the actor does the growl even when doing some of Hurley’s more dry dumpy plodding expository stuff too. O’Brien’s resentment towards him is fierce, and predictably, it is quite ruthless but the two of these actors help to rise the relationship Freeman’s Hurley and Rapp above the been there done that’s military sage protege relationships.
Interestingly, the same can be observed regarding most of the characters in the film, for they are characters hungry for the same things audiences have seen on other spy films in one variation or the other. The most serious characterization blunder of this motion picture, however, concerns the development of Taylor Kitsch’s Ghost, a former apprentice to Hurley who becomes the central villain of the film. In most of American Assassin he wastes the opportunity to do anything interesting wasting time showing up to thwart Mitch and Hurley’s plans and even more disappointing is the show of animosity he has towards the latter that is never really fleshed out. Kitsch has demonstrated in the past that he is indeed a far better actor than most films allow him the freedom of being, howbeit, even he cannot give much depth or flair to Ghost’s character.
The contrast portrayed by the villain in American Assassin makes it even harder to appreciate the most problematic aspects of the film’s conclusion, and we can only speculate on the possible outcome of this film if the confrontation/conflicting moments between Rapp and Ghost had been left to a better editing. But with everything being stated above, there are a number of pre faint and combat sequences in the first half of the film-Films directed by Cuesta are all fairly infused with high level of sophistication and realism, bridging the gap between the films present and their earliest stress filled and aggressive nature. The Verdict American Assassin has some of the most horrifying, barbaric and gut-wrenching action anyone has witnessed in films this year. But there is no way of projecting the same purpose and energy on the rest of the film apart from the first act due to a very underwhelming climax as well as an abrupt very unnecessary shift in the story towards the end.
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