Movie Review: American Assassin

There’s another scene in the movie where she and Rapp both just got out of a fight. Rapp is mildly injured with a bruised rib, or something, it’s not exactly clear, and Katrina has cuts and bruises all over her face. He’s trying and struggling somehow to put a bandage on his easily accessible side, and Katrina tries to further their romantic subplot by putting a bandage on him. Somehow the visual dichotomy of Rapp, shirtless (of course), looking totally fine, and this battered woman caring for him just didn’t connect with me emotionally in the way I think the director was going for.

The main thing about this movie is that it hugely lacks personality, and everything that might be interesting is only explored to a surface level. Stylistically it’s going for something like Zero Dark Thirty, but it feels like the made for TV movie version of that style, and it doesn’t feel like that style is the right choice in the first place. The geopolitical backdrop for the bomb barely gets any attention, many of the characters feel like cardboard cutouts, the villain’s plan doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

If I were to explain the movie to someone else, it sounds like it could be a really good movie. In practice, it’s just hard to get through. The whole last half I was pretty much waiting for it to be over. The story is meh, the writing is eh, the acting is blah, the action is bleh, and the whole thing feels like a vehicle for Dylan O’Brien to become an action star, which he gets a C+ at. I’d recommend skipping this one.