Movie Review: A Wild Michael Keaton Makes the Dumb “American Assassin” Kinda Fun

Well, they didn’t call it Genius Assassin, and for good reason.

It takes about 15 minutes (and that may be generous) to recognise Michael Cuesta’s American Assassin won’t be a thoughtful exercise in geopolitical espionage.

After seeing his fiancée get gunned down during a grisly terrorist incident, our vengeful hero Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’Brien) drops out of college and devotes himself to the arts of MMA, gunplay and knife-throwing for 18 months, in preparation for a meeting with her murderers. (We know he has become forever hardened by the tragedy, because he used to openly cry, but now he has a beard. His body has also been sculpted, though his two distractingly lone tufts of chest hair remain.)

His plan is to kill all radical insurgents, cell by cell, on his own. That is, until Rapp is intercepted by the CIA’s Irene Kennedy (Sanaa Lathan, here for a good and not a long time), who invites him to lend his talents to the government. “Don’t you think I already thought of that,” he replies casually; or, something to that effect. If I’d known American Assassin—based on the book by Vince Flynn and adapted by four men who will here remain nameless—would produce such a steady stream of absurd dialogue, I would have brought a notepad. Usually I can remember quotes after leaving the cinema, but I think American Assassin dumbed them out of my head.

Rapp is dumped on the doorstop of black ops veteran Stan Hurley (a wild Michael Keaton) and trained up for an elite “ghost” program where recruits are told they'll be left for dead if compromised in the field. Only those with a death wish need apply, which suits Rapp just fine, except for the parts that involve following orders. Dammit, the kid’s a loose cannon!

This is the kind of movie where a nuclear weapon comes with its own giant LED countdown timer; the kind where a female agent can’t slinkily squeeze through a locked gate without removing her trench coat first; the kind where Taylor Kitsch can play a villainous ghost-gone-wrong who takes his shirt off before torturing people. It is, to put it bluntly, not the sharpest throwing knife in the weapons-belt.

At least it’s fun. Keaton, dialed all the way up to ‘Beyond Birdman’, chews up so much scenery he actually gobs a bit of his co-star’s ear (no, for real). If you don’t think you’ll enjoy watching Michael Keaton constantly putting people in sleeper-holds—aka Night Shifting—seek your entertainment elsewhere.

American Assassin is also ideologically sketchy. Then again, that’s par for the course when it comes to films about American foreign policy (and the shaky moral line walked by its counterintelligence agencies). Does it mean anything that this trigger-happy flick (with its own simmering nuclear stand-off) is the first American-titled feature in the age of Trump? Does anything mean anything in the age of Trump? Do I dare give American Assassin—with its zero-gravity fist fight on a speeding boat—that much mental processing power? Nah.

Cuesta’s action sequences, shot with immersive skill by Enrique Chediak, are brutal, yet effective. Elsewhere, the editing is choppy, with some cutaways bending basic filmmaking logic. The training set pieces—in which Rapp wears a VR headset to spot enemies, and then stalks an IKEA for a staged shoot-out—are more compelling than the standard spy stuff that follows, which all takes place in glamorous hotel rooms and foreign plazas. Standard can still mean serviceable, I suppose.

O’Brien, returning after a long absence following a near-tragic accident on the set of the third Maze Runner, is snide and sneering as Rapp. There’s a reason most cinematic spies are wry and charming: so that we’ll want to see them in a sequel. Mitch, I can probably go without. If American Assassin achieves anything, it’s making my relentless campaign for Maze Runner: The Death Cure’s release more urgent. O'Brien is a star when he's navigating literal mazes rather than moral ones.

3/5

In cinemas now. Rated MA15+ for strong violence.

Photo: Lionsgate