The Main Attraction in 'American Assassin' is The Action

Gun-toting, terrorist-slaying Mitch Rapp (Dylan O'Brien) joins an elite squad.

Fists and Bullets Fly in Pulse-Pounding ‘American Assassin’

It’s the opening scene to the start of a fairytale romance: a sun dappled stretch of sandy beach, gorgeous touchy-feely couples, fruity drinks with paper umbrellas, and glistening waves, lapping at the shore. Young twenty-something Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’Brien) spirited away his sweetie Katrina (Charlotte Vega) to Spain, to propose to her. Filming the whole thing with his iPhone to capture this shining moment he professes his love, embarrassing and teasing the heck of her. Gleefully and choked up with happy tears, Katrina gives the magic “yes”! But, Mitch and Katrina’s blissful visions of honeymoons and married life go up in flames in a matter of minutes when a battalion of bearded terrorists storm the shore, open firing on all of the beach goers. Mitch gets separated from Katrina in the chaos, and when he finally breaks through the mobs of people he’s reunited with her for a mere instant, before watching her get gunned down.

Mitch was riddled with bullets himself, but he survives the attack, and as we see when American Assassin jumps ahead to a year and half later, he’s harder, colder, and harboring a huge grudge. Mitch’s body is buffed as hell from all his combat training, and his beast moves at the gym, but it’s still scarred. Not in just on his body but in his heart too. At its core American Assassin is that age old tale of lost love. Mitch doesn’t wallow in his grief though, instead he chooses to make it into a weapon. Building up his physical strength in gyms, and learning everything he can about what makes the standard terrorist tick, Mitch clings to his goal. Unsurprisingly, it’s revenge, he seeks to exact justice for Katrina. Determined to infiltrate as many terrorist cells as he can, he sets his sights on personally annihilating the cell responsible for killing her in the first place.

Mitch’s formidable combat moves and his single-minded ferocity puts him on the radar of the CIA Deputy Director Irene Kennedy. With an insidious plot brewing in the middle east to build a nuclear weapon, (what other kind of nefarious terrorist plot is there?!) she kind of recruits but mostly blackmails Mitch into joining a special ops force.

With his vigilante days over, Mitch is dumped on the doorstep of a crude, rude and unyielding Navy veteran, Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton). He’s the stereotypical hard-as-nails mentor, and doesn’t break away from that trope during the duration of American Assassin. Determined to weed out the wannabes from the more promising recruits, he unleashes a hell week onto the young men. Predictably, the many other faceless fighters don’t make the cut, but our man Mitch does in a hot minute. Stan reluctantly welcomes Mitch into the fold, but not without making it clear that he is below other recruit Victor (Scott Adkins) and has to follow every order.

When traveling across the Middle East reveals a former special op agent, one of Hurley’s finest boys, has gone rogue and is the one building the nuke, Mitch throws caution to the wind. Looks like the warning Stan grumbled in the very beginning to Mitch, “Never make it personal” has become just that. Along with Turkish spy Annika (Shiva Negar) Mitch disobeys order after order, each more ridiculous  and eye-rolling than the last from both Irene and Hurley. How Irene and Hurley can be so deluded and clueless is a mark on how underdeveloped their characters are, and how desperate the film is to give Mitch as much savage screentime as possible. The only one with any sense in the entire operation and no guilt or that little thing called a conscience to hold him back, Mitch is the most indispensable and irrefutably ass kicking assassin in the aptly named American Assassin.

As Mitch, actor Dylan O’Brien has the makings of a brilliant new action hero. O’Brien has been the face for James Dashner’s The Maze Runner adaptations, and he got his start as the comic relief character Stiles Stilinski opposite newly-turned werewolf Scott McCall in MTV’s Teen Wolf. But this time around, he’s not cracking jokes or witty turns of phrase. Instead, he’s a lethal and singularly minded man, pumping bullets into terrorists without blinking. The fighting choreography is captivating and lively-- there are no recycled kicks and punches here, but an ever evolving physical badassery. His magnetism on screen is enough to carry the movie, and cancel the very scant character development.

Mitch and Annika hit the streets.

American Assassin isn’t rated R for graphic sex --in fact it’s actually rather chaste: there are no hookups and practically no nudity -- but for the aggressive action, for the copious bloodshed, torture scenes, and smack downs that fly across the screen. The plot in American Assassin is decently developed, but it’s still rather shaky and holey especially where it concerns former special op agent, “Ghost” (Taylor Kitsch). We never get to the root of Ghost’s radical behavior and his frequently exploits and escapes, while daring, are also ridiculously unbelievable. How the CIA managed to discover Mitch, let alone intercept one of his terrorist take-down missions in Libya is another flimsy plot point, loaded with holes. It stretches the bounds of fiction in a way that makes us scratch our heads and go “huh, wha?” instead of being a fantasy we can buy into. It’s hard to suspend disbelief when watching American Assassin because so much of it is half-baked. The characters don’t expand beyond their generic tropes, the story isn’t breaking news, and some of the dialogue creeps into cliches. The main attraction in American Assassin is the action-- action is what we’re promised from the teasers, and action as it so happens, is exactly what we get. American Assassin isn’t going to be winning any awards for its narrative. It doesn’t make us think critically at the world around us or challenge our beliefs or the status quo. No, American Assassin is purely escapist entertainment, perfect it is not, but an absolute thrill, a breath-taking, pulse-pounding, adrenaline-shooting, thrill.

Images from IMDB