By Matthew Dillon
American Assassin is yet another painfully generic, forgettable action movie, depicting a young vigilante’s mission to stop Iran from employing a nuclear weapon. The film’s plot is as by the numbers as it gets, populated by a legion of forgettable clichés. It feels like a telemovie that wandered into theaters, failing to adhere to even the most basic rules of filmmaking. From its mandatory opening massacre to its infuriating cliffhanger ending, American Assassin fails to hit home at any point. Recent films, such as John Wick, have proven that there’s still a place for dumb, albeit fun, action flicks. But American Assassin is anything but that, as it is too preoccupied with being a derivative, pointless film to even be entertaining.
After a group of terrorists brutally gun down his fiancée, the troubled Mitch becomes obsessed with revenge. Played by Dylan O’Brien, Mitch is proclaimed to be a capable, if unstable, vigilante, though the presentation falls short of that. The scrawny, boyish O’Brien fails to make the protagonist intimidating, and he ends up being very unlikable and, at times, even outright laughable. The writing just makes it worse, as Mitch lacks any emotions that are not varying degrees of frustration or rage. There is no nuance to his character whatsoever, he is just another hopeless, revenge driven, anti-hero in a genre drowning in them.
No one in this film has anything close to a character arc, least of all Mitch. By the ending, he is still the same, single-minded, angry killer he was at the start of the film and will apparently continue to be for the rest of his life. That stagnation could have easily been presented as profound or even tragic but instead, American Assassin unironically indulges in it. While no one in American Assassin feels like a real person, Mitch is just a hollow caricature.
The rest of the cast mostly exists to enable Mitch’s increasingly erratic actions and are mainly completely disposable plot devices. They are collectively convinced that a crazed vigilante incapable of following orders is a priceless military asset, for reasons that are not particularly convincing. Mitch’s government trainer is played by a very bored Michael Keaton, a generic, severe mentor figure who has no qualms with pushing his charges to their physical and emotional limits. It is not clear what this actually accomplishes and, if anything, it makes Mitch even more erratic instead of disciplining him. American Assassin does not just have an obnoxious protagonist, but it also fails to produce any likable characters.
American Assassin’s story has all the hallmarks of a mediocre action flick. Most noticeably, it cycles through various disposable villains, every one of them more unoriginal than the next. The Middle Eastern crime magnate gives away to Iranian government agents who in turn are displaced by the main antagonist, mercenary called Ghost. Ghost is every boring, action movie villain merged together and lacks even a single redeeming quality. The presentation makes it worse, as the sound design, camera quality and editing are all over the place. American Assassin is incapable of maintaining or even establishing a sense of continuity, whether it be for a single scene or the overarching plot.
For a dumb action film, American Assassin goes heavy on the clumsy exposition sequences and skimps out on the actual action. These dialogue-heavy scenes are not just boring but also difficult to follow, due to a wandering camera and an apparently AWOL editor. This plays into how the film tries desperately to be shocking, but usually only ends up feeling trashy. The most memorably bad one is a terrorist recruitment video Mitch watches, which is accompanied by goofy, royalty-free heavy metal music. The poor special effects make this worse, as the film cannot even pull off basic shootouts properly, much less the climax’s convoluted nautical nuclear detonation. Like most of the film, it’s straight out of an old school Playstation game.
American Assassin feels like a terrible ’80s action flick imported to the Modern Era. Between its lifeless protagonist, stereotypical foreign villains, sleazy violence and laughable attempts at grandeur, it’s a Die Hard/Rambo imitator that showed up 30 years late. American Assassin falls just short of “so bad it is good” films like The Room, so it is just a waste of your time.
