When you’re one of those people that goes to the cinema a lot it is movies such as American Assassin that seem to become the most stale and the most generic the fastest. Of course, to audiences that only see a few movies in theaters every year American Assassin will be a perfectly acceptable piece of action pulp.
Let’s come to the movie. "American Assassin" is an action film, a spy thriller, a meditation on revenge, and a story about mentors and pupils, but mostly it’s a movie that loves to maim and kill people and is very good at it. Dylan O’Brien stars as Mitch Rapp, an American who loses his parents in a car wreck as a child, then fails to save his fiancee from a terrorist attack and vows to find and execute the head of the cell that ordered it. Mitch gets pulled into the CIA, where he’s trained as an assassin by Cold War veteran and former Navy S.E.A.L. Stan Hurley(Michael Keaton). Then one of Hurley’s former trainees, an arms dealer known as Ghost(Taylor Kitsch), enters the picture, and things get murky
To the movie’s credit, it does subvert a handful of expectations within certain scenarios while never being afraid to flaunt its more brutal aspects, but it also never embraces its own genre for the more exciting aspects that such a genre has to offer. Rather, this is a movie that is given ample opportunity by its genre to do some cool things with the story it is telling, but rather than take advantage of them American Assassin seems to consistently waste each and every one of them.
Overall I would like to say that American Assassin fails to set an actual target on what it wants to be. In fact, the film itself doesn’t even know what it’s doing to impress moviegoers like me alike. I say, confusing films always end up being mediocre to an extent, but I sure hope that I see an exception to the list one day or another.