BEFORE: Well, around our house July 4 is definitely a day where we do NOT leave the house unless we have to. It's just too dangerous out there, between the illegal fireworks and everyone celebrating their freedoms by blowing stuff up. It seems there were a number of mass shootings around the country too, so I feel like our plan was justified. Hey, what's more American than mass shootings?
So we just stayed inside and made matzoh ball soup, I watched a few old episodes of "Chopped" and then this movie. And we're down one air conditioner, so my wife's been sleeping in the living room, and I slept in the bedroom with the windows open. Hopefully somebody can come tomorrow and fix the A.C. to make the bedroom cool again for sleepy-time.
Khalid Laith carries over from "The Devil's Double".
THE PLOT: After the death of his girlfriend at the hands of terrorists, Mitch Rapp is drawn into the world of counterterrorism, mentored by tough-as-nails former U.S. Navy S.E.A.L. Stan Hurley.
AFTER: Well, the parade of this year's assassin and/or hit-men movies continues, and even though I'm going to take a couple days off after this, my next movie is ANOTHER assassin-based movie that ALSO stars Michael Keaton. Go figure, huh? And it's also got Samuel L. Jackson, so really, there were a couple ways to get there. It would be kind of weird if Samuel L. Jackson DIDN'T turn up at least four times during any given Movie Year.
I have now watched enough of them, this year alone, to really start noticing the similarities, the plot points that are common to all of them, or at least to MOST of them. There's the young lead who has to go through a tough training process - and they've lost a family member or a loved one, which justifies the path that they're on, devoid of all personal attachments (ideally). Then there's the tough mentor who puts them through the training - could be the world-weary type who's seen it all, but he (or she) also KNOWS all. The Yoda-meets-Mace Windu type. Then there could also be the former student of the mentor, who followed a different path and is now working for the other side, they resent the young lead who's following in their footsteps, and they're now an extremely dangerous force for evil. That's basically the plot of both this film AND "Barely Lethal", the latter just added the high-school setting for the sake of comedy. (But yeah, also "Domino" and "Hanna" and "The 355", they all followed this formula pretty closely, only with slight variations...)
No comedy in this one, though - this is serious stuff, like infiltrating Muslim sleeper cells and learning how to stab enemies in the throat. But it's all in the name of finding out who's got the enriched plutonium that recently sold on the black market, and what that person or government intends to do with it. We've got a treaty with Iran that prevents them from taking any steps toward building a nuclear device - so that means it's probably Iran, right?
Mitch Rapp was vacationing on Ibiza with his girlfriend, and he had JUST popped the question - ooh, bad thing to do in an action movie, you might as well be just two weeks from retirement or show a picture of your girlfriend back home to a fellow soldier. The terrorists strike, and Mitch gets shot, and his girlfriend gets killed (not a spoiler, it's right there in the synopsis...). This sets him on a path to train vigorously and study the Muslim religion so he can pretend to be a regular teenager trying to betray his American homeland, and once he's infiltrated the terrorist cell, he plans to take it down from the inside.
Before he can act, however, the U.S Special Forces detail is on the scene, and they take the cell down for him. The CIA Deputy Director holds Mitch in custody for 30 days, then after debriefing him she offers him a chance to join a black ops unit called Orion, which is so super-secret that even the people in charge of it have never heard of it. (I have a bottle of Brooklyn Black Ops Stout tucked away in my beer fridge, and it says right on the label "Brooklyn Black Ops Stout does not exist." One of these days, I've got to crack it open and check for myself.)
The training is tough, and we assume that most of the recruits wash out, or maybe they don't survive the training, I'm not sure. Oh, yeah, that's the best part of all of these assassin films, the training montage... The few that remain in the program get tasked with a mission to Turkey to intercept the prospective buyer of the plutonium. And to see if the man caught on camera trying to sell it is really who the mentor thinks he is... Nah, but that's impossible, he couldn't still be alive, could he? Of course he is. I saw this same sort of thing in "The November Man", the animosity between trainer and trainee, they were once on the same side, but now all bets are off, because one of them might be working for the other side. I also saw this sort of thing in "The Gray Man", back in January, with the psychopathic ex-agent.
Well, at least in "American Assassin" you know who the bad guys are - it's the non-Americans, plus the one psychopathic ex-agent who's got a grudge against his old mentor and the young buck who replaced him. It's a little by-the-numbers for me by now, but damn, the formula still works. Oh, yeah, one more thing that's become a staple in these films, it's the torture scene to get important information - totes classic. "The Man From Toronto" was all about this sort of thing, but it also popped up in "Barely Lethal" and I think in "Kate" and "The Rhythm Section" too. This one puts a twist on things by having the BAD GUY need some important information from the mentor, so he tortures the mentor character to get it.
WOW, but Michael Keaton really did well here, it reminded me of him in the 1989 "Batman" film when he faced off against the Joker and said, "You wanna get nuts? Let's get NUTS!" Or, you, know, some of the scenes in "Birdman" too, Keaton's great in nearly everything he does. At that point I don't really care if an action film is following a formula or not, as long as it's putting out the BEST version it can of those formulaic things.
This film is based on the prequel book from a series of 21 books, all written by Vincent Flynn, who died in 2013. But the intent was probably to make Mitch Rapp the next James Bond-type character, or at least the next Jack Ryan. This still could happen, but this film didn't do as well at the box office as hoped, so who knows. I'd watch a sequel, though. Pre-production on "American Assassin" began in 2012, they had to start film production by 2016 or the rights to the book would revert back to the author's estate. Looks like they made it, but now who knows if this can be a viable franchise?
Also starring Dylan O'Brien (last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Michael Keaton (last seen in "Morbius"), Sanaa Lathan (last seen in "Now You See Me 2"), Shiva Negar, Taylor Kitsch (last seen in "The Normal Heart"), David Suchet (last seen in "Effie Gray"), Navid Negahban (last seen in "Aladdin" (2019)), Scott Adkins (last seen in "Criminal"), Alaa Safi (last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Mohammad Bakri, Charlotte Vega (last seen in "The Bookshop"), Shahid Ahmed (last seen in "28 Weeks Later"), Yousef Sweid, Trevor White (last seen in "Jason Bourne"), Joseph Long, Gjevat Kelmendi, Tolga Safer, Bruno Bilotta, Vladimir Friedman (last seen in "The Operative"), Sydney White, Andrew Pleavin (last seen in "London Has Fallen"), Matt Rippy (last seen in "Eddie the Eagle"), Luing Andrews (last seen in "The Heat"), Dacio Caballero, Jake Mann, Zachary Momoh (last seen in "Harriet").
RATING: 7 out of 10 targets at the shooting range
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