American Assassin

American Assassin

“American Assassin” is an action movie, a spy thriller, a story about mentors and pupils, a meditation on revenge but mostly it’s just very excited to get out there and maim and kill people. And it’s good at it. Dylan O’Brien stars as Mitch Rapp an American whose parents died in a car accident when he was a child, then lost his fiancee in a terrorist attack and decided to track down the cell that ordered it and execute its leader. This leads him into the CIA, where he is trained by Cold War veteran/ former Navy S.E.A.L. Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton) to become an assassin, until one of Hurley’s former trainees now an arms dealer known as Ghost (Taylor Kitsch) shows up.

I don’t mean plot-wise; I mean why does this movie exist? “American Assassin” tells us repeatedly that revenge poisons the soul and is generally bad while also showing scenes of Mitch & Co. killing terrorists and bad guys with guns and knives and their hands and feet and cars and trucks and household items used as weapons in ways they were not designed for. It does not take long to work out where this movie’s heart lies with regard to these twin impulses, nor would it have been any less honest if the film had embraced them from jump street.

O’Brien is slight but wiry enough to make you believe he could pull off being the strong silent type hero of an action franchise; he plays Mitch as one of those morose outsiders who doesn’t respect authority figures but does such a good job that his superiors including Sanaa Lathan as CIA Deputy Director Irene Kennedy (wasted!) keep indulging his hunches & forgiving his excesses.

The tone & style are cool & assured for about 30 minutes, then the film loses its way after that: A tight often wordless opening section that lets us know Mitch’s homicidal tunnel-vision through training montages, encrypted online exchanges with terrorist recruiters & closeups of his grief-stricken eyes.

But then the film turns him into a stubbly butt-kicking ingenue defined mainly by smart-ass quips and astonishing physicality (credit to Cuesta for keeping the camera back far enough to show that O’Brien is doing a lot of his own stunts). There are hints of chemistry between Mitch and a Turkish agent (Shiva Negar’s Annika) who teams up with Stan’s unit, but this movie isn’t built for it: Mates in action films exist to die and be avenged, and grief is more often asserted than explored. So too here.

Through the second hour, Mitch is a deadly extra in his own story. This section has a lot of vengeance; several characters re-enact their version of Mitch’s fight, but none are well enough defined to support an ensemble approach: you may simultaneously feel like you’re getting too much of every major character but also not enough, and that the philosophical inquiry into revenge was tacked onto the screenplay to make it look like a thoughtful statement instead of a bloody lark.

Except for Mitch and Ghost, who keep meeting supporting characters with murderous grudges against other people or politicians in their own government or sometimes whole nations and ethnic groups. A band of disgruntled Iranian officials and military officers want to build a nuclear weapon with material supplied by Ghost to get revenge against the faction that drove them from power; these folks also want revenge against United States and Israel to repay old indignities (Ghost tells an Iranian high musketry muck that once they concludes their deal, “you can kill as many Jews as you want”).

Sometimes “American Assassin” seems like it wants us to think it’s an earthbound film. At certain points thriller buffs might be reminded of John Frankenheimer’s bracingly nasty R-rated thrillers particularly “Black Sunday,” which revolved around the Mossad and the PLO, and co-starred Bruce Dern as a disillusioned veteran who, like Ghost, wants to punish America for disfiguring his body and spirit or “Day of the Jackal” or “Munich”; there are even echoes of an obscure 1980s film called “The Amateur,” about a CIA researcher (John Savage) who convinces the agency to train him to kill so he can avenge his wife’s murder by terrorists. The script name-checks real life geopolitical rivals, terrorist groups, political events; besides Iran and Israel we get references to post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi government, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Obama administration’s Iran deal.

But by the end of the film it is clear that it’s disgruntled mavericks who are creating the immediate problems. This is the “one bad apple” approach to storytelling that’s meant to provide rhetorical cover for movie studios should anyone try to protest the film or stop it from being exported to their country.

The screenplay is credited to four people: Stephen Schiff (currently a writer on FX’s “The Americans”); Michael Finch (“The Interrogation,” “The November Man,” “Hitman: Agent 47”); and Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick (“The Siege,” about a terrorist attack that leads to New York being quarantined; “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back”). The director is Michael Cuesta, perhaps best known for his work on Showtime’s “Homeland,” a series that mixes geopolitical specificity with melodrama, treats much of the Middle East as a brown menace even as it insists things are more complicated than that.

The movie summons ghosts of the Bourne saga when Ghost compares himself and Mitch to monsters that were created by the military-industrial complex to snuff out designated enemies but turned on their creators instead but it never pulls off the magic act that made the first three Bourne films (which seem increasingly miraculous in retrospect) feel contradiction-free.

The cast does their best with writing that often confuses explanation for emotion. Only Michael Keaton, the only person alive who has been acting for forty years and can make even a bad movie good, comes close to creating an emotionally coherent, much less memorable character. Is there another current star who is as instantly charismatic who gets us on his side from frame one and never lets us leave it?

A skinny leatherneck here, a business class dad’s idea of middle-aged machismo there; only when he defies like Cagney does the film earn its solitary thunderous cheer (you’ll know the moment when you see it). For his part Keaton keeps making lines that should be DOA pulse with life by putting weird pauses in his responses to questions and looking shifty at people and things, so that you keep thinking maybe Stan knows something. Maybe he does know something: maybe “American Assassin” isn’t what it says it is, and he and we will have a better time if he pretends he’s in the other movie.

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