Movie Review: American Assassin

For example, Rapp’s primary motivation was the death of his wife and, as the story would have us believe, he becomes irrationally triggered to become a violent psychopath at the mere mention of this tragedy 18+ months later. It’s not that this isn’t a decent setup for the character, but the unreasonableness of Rapp’s reaction stretches beyond believability, when we’re also expected to believe that he’s smart enough to master Arabic in 18 months.

There’s a segment where Hurley puts Rapp into an AR training simulation where if he shoots a friendly target, he essentially gets tased by the training suit. To mess with Rapp, Hurley puts the terrorist who plotted the attack that killed Rapp’s fiance into the sim as a friendly. Rapp nearly kills himself trying to shoot the clearly not real picture of a man who already died much earlier in the film. This was supposed to be impactful — I just thought it was dumb.

The acting in the film was cringe-worthy at times. The CIA director, Irene Kennedy, totally missed the mark for me. He performance felt so forced I actually felt like I could see the cameras and sets while she was onscreen.

The female supporting actress, another spy named Katrina, also gave a somewhat cringeworthy performance, but in her case the writing surely didn’t help. There’s a scene in the movie where Rapp is sitting on a couch brooding and Katrina gives this really hard to watch “I feel your pain, I’ve lost people, too” pep talk that’s supposed to jumpstart their by-the-way romantic subplot that is both unwanted and never actually happens.