Michael Cuesta
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Filmography
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The Insider (1999)
Directed by Michael Mann
influenced Kill the Messenger (2014)
Themes Plot Characters
The movie, based on a true story, lacks the emotional resonance of similarly themed films such as “All the President’s Men” and “The Insider,” but it’s a story worth telling, even if all the pieces aren’t there.
The second finds him going for a meager version of “The Insider.”
The crusading journalist has been a mainstay of thrillers—some depicting real events, some not—through out the post-Watergate era, in films starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford (“All the President’s Men”), Warren Beatty (“The Parallax View”), James Woods (“Salvador”), Mel Gibson (“The Year of Living Dangerously”), Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington (“The Pelican Brief”), Al Pacino (“The Insider”), Robert Downey, Jr., and Jake Gyllenhaal (“Zodiac”), Russell Crowe (“State of Play”), and many others.
The closest parallel is Russell Crowe in The Insider, except Crowe’s Jeffrey Wigand is a source who has a dogged journalist (Al Pacino’s Lowell Bergman) fighting for him.
Kill the Messenger doesn’t have the level of elegance and taut excitement of such exposé classics as All the President’s Men, The Insider or Erin Brockovich .
Films like All the President’s Men, The Parallax View and The Insider are a few examples.
The Academy Award-nominated actor pulls out all the stops, returning to his Night Shift / Beetlejuice / Batman bag of tricks in order to go bug-eyed, unhinged, excitedly angry crazy and it’s absolutely glorious, this five minutes scene breathing life into a movie that, up until then, had found it to be in frustratingly short supply.
Si ya el título habla a las claras, la yema del asunto se complicará más adelante cuando Mitch termine en un grupo de elite de la CIA, y quede bajo el mando de Stan Hurley (un Michael Keaton que acá, a los 66 años, sí, recurre a todos los tics que le conocemos de Beetlejuice a esta parte.
Sharing the screen with the actor who gave us “Beetlejuice,” “Batman,” “Birdman” and more is an equally daunting challenge, but he’s up to it.
You’ll also be entertained, as intended, by Keaton summoning every ounce of “Beetlejuice”-vintage crazy for a turn as torture victim.
A news report refers to “The American President.”
In an action-thriller content with being generic, the actor stands out — not because he has found a role better suited to his charms than Battleship, or a feature better marketed than John Carter, but because it's easy to imagine him playing the hero instead.
Hurley recognizes all of Mitch’s bad tendencies — he’s seen them in his former agent turned mercenary Ghost (Taylor Kitsch, John Carter ).
The film’s villain, a renegade former U.S. Navy officer known only by his nickname “Ghost” and portrayed by John Carter and Lone Survivor star Taylor Kitsch, has captured clandestine CIA operative, and his former superior, Stan Hurley and is using every interrogative torture tool at his disposal in order to find out some key information.
Still, watching them side by side, it’s hard not to think that Kitsch would have made a better, more intriguing Rapp if he weren’t stuck in leading-man jail after the back-to-back flops of “John Carter” and “Battleship” all the way back in 2012.
In recent years, we’ve had American Gangster, American Hustle, American Sniper and American Made.
“American Assassin,” an action thriller based on a 2010 book by “24” consultant Vince Flynn, is no “American Sniper.”
The mightily underrated Olympus Has Fallen started the body count, American Sniper brought box-office dollars, and Peter Berg’s blue-collar trio of Lone Survivor – Deepwater Horizon – Patriot’s Day stands as one of the best (unofficial) trilogies to be released.
There is some nicely shuffled three card monte involving Iran's Minister Behurz (Navid Negahban, "American Sniper"), General Rostami (Joseph Long, "Dracula Untold") and Hurley's informant Ashani (Mohammad Bakri), but the film essentially posits its hard core, barking Hurley as a guy trying to rein in his unruly children.
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu
influenced American Assassin (2017)
Sharing the screen with the actor who gave us “Beetlejuice,” “Batman,” “Birdman” and more is an equally daunting challenge, but he’s up to it.
There is some nicely shuffled three card monte involving Iran's Minister Behurz (Navid Negahban, "American Sniper"), General Rostami (Joseph Long, "Dracula Untold") and Hurley's informant Ashani (Mohammad Bakri), but the film essentially posits its hard core, barking Hurley as a guy trying to rein in his unruly children.
Brian Cox, so convincing as a macho pederast in 2001�s L.I.E., shines as a facilitator of screenwriting workshops (�God help you if you ever use voice-overs in your script,� he screams at students from a podium, before one of Cage�s voice-overs chimes in to hilarious effect).
Who knew The Maze Runner's Dylan O'Brien could out-Bourne Matt Damon's Jason Bourne, but he does in Michael Cuesta's American Assassin.
It’s a low-rent “Jason Bourne” about Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’Brien, “Teen Wolf”), a young American whose beautiful, bikini-clad fiancee, Katrina (Charlotte Vega), to whom he has just proposed via selfie cam on a beach in Ibiza, is shot to death by Muslim terrorists.
But Rapp distinguishes himself and despite Hurley's objections, is teamed with the older man and fellow recruit Victor (Scott Adkins, "Doctor Strange") to meet up with Turkish agent Annika (Shiva Negar) in Rome in hopes of recovering plutonium that's made its way into the hands of a mysterious operative (Taylor Kitsch, "Lone Survivor") who has hired an Iranian physicist to build a nuclear warhead.