American Assassin (2017)
Directed by Michael Cuesta
Following the murder of his fiancée, Mitch Rapp trains under the instruction of Cold War veteran Stan Hurley. The pair then is enlisted to investigate a wave of apparently random attacks on military and civilian targets.
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8 films that influenced American Assassin
What critics say influenced American Assassin
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.
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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.
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.