American Assassin movie review (2017) | Roger Ebert
Mitch is a lethal bystander to his own story throughout the second hour. Vengeance comes up a lot during this section, with multiple characters enacting their own version of Mitch’s struggle, but none are well-defined enough to support an ensemble approach; you may simultaneously feel you’re getting too much of every major character but also not enough, and that the philosophical inquiry into the idea of revenge has been layered onto the screenplay to make it feel like a thoughtful statement instead of a bloody lark. Besides Mitch and Ghost, we keep meeting supporting characters who hold murderous grudges against other people, against politicians in their own government, sometimes against entire 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-muckety-muck that once they conclude their deal, “you can kill as many Jews as you want”).
“American Assassin” sometimes seems to want us to think it’s an earthbound film. At some points, thriller buffs might be reminded of John Frankenheimer’s bracingly nasty R-rated thrillers—in particular “Black Sunday,” which revolved around the Mossad and the PLO, and costarred Bruce Dern as a disillusioned veteran who, like Ghost, wants to punish America for disfiguring his body and spirit. There are also traces of “Day of the Jackal” and “Munich” and 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, and political events. Besides Iran and Israel, there are references to the post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi government, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Obama administration’s Iran deal.
But by the end, the film makes it 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 of “The Interrogation,” “The November Man” and “Hitman: Agent 47”; and Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, a team whose credits include “The Siege” (about a terrorist attack that leads to New York being quarantined) and “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 and melodrama, and treats much of the Middle East as a brown menace even as it insists things are more complicated than that. The movie summons the 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.
