American Assassin: Unfolds Like a Right-Winger’s Wet Dream

Editor’s Note: American Assassin opens in wide theatrical release today, September 15, 2017.

Moments into American Assassin, the franchise starter wannabe based on Vince Flynn’s throwback pulp action-thriller series directed with competent anonymity by Michael Cuesta (Kill the Messenger, Roadie), Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’Brien, Teen Wolf, The Maze Runner series), a privileged, twenty-something vacationing on the island paradise of Ibiza with his girlfriend-turned-fiancée, Katrina (Charlotte Vega), loses everything to a jihadi terrorist attack. He loses Katrina to a terrorist’s bullet, but he also loses his peculiarly American sense of invulnerability, innocence, and naiveté, but in Katrina’s untimely death (textbook “fridging” by any definition), he finds a new, singular sense of purpose: pure, undistilled vengeance by any non-legal, lethal means necessary. But to get to the point where he can turn his violent, revenge fantasies into reality, he has to undergo rigorous mental, physical, and emotional training, not to mention become fluent in Arabic and learn the intricacies of jihadis’ warped interpretation of the Koran before venturing to Tripoli, Libya to terminate his fiancée’s killers with extreme prejudice.

With a screenplay credited to four writers, including Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, American Assassin unfolds like a right-winger’s wet dream of the United States: “America, F— Yeah!” minus the irony.

Rapp’s immersion into the jihadi-way-of-life, up to and including joining Arabic-language chat groups online, doesn’t go unnoticed, however. With the PATRIOT Act still in full effect, a CIA deputy director, Irene Kennedy (Sanaa Lathan), follows Rapp’s every suspicious and non-suspicious move, online and off, from the mixed-martial arts gym to his Spartan apartment. And since it’s all for the common good – defending the United States of America from enemies foreign and domestic – it’s more than allowable. It’s an unquestioned given by everyone in and out of the CIA. Kennedy, of course, sees more than a misguided, impulsive revenge-seeker in the obsessively driven Rapp: She sees Rapp’s potential to become a black ops operative without parallel or equal (“He’s tested off the charts!” we’re told repeatedly). But Rapp prefers to play lone wolf revenge-seeker, not government operative following orders like any good soldier. Kennedy sees Rapp’s deep-seated problems with authority – and authority figures – as a minor problem, easily surmountable once Rapp joins a super-special, blacker than black, black-ops training program codenamed “Orion” run by a grizzled, cynical, Cold-War veteran, Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton).

Hurley takes an instant dislike to Rapp’s anti-authoritarian attitude, but Kennedy, a one-time protégé-turned-boss, forces his hand. Before long, Hurley’s tearing down Rapp, shouting platitudes at Rapp, zapping him with an electric-shock vest when Rapp repeatedly tries to shoot a hologram of his fiancée’s killer during a training exercise, and showing Rapp trauma-inducing video of his fiancée’s last moments (taken by a carefully positioned camera, no less), all to turn Rapp into an order-taking, emotionless killing machine. He almost succeeds, but once an ex-operative-turned-mercenary nicknamed “Ghost” (Taylor Kitsch) shows up at a black market in Eastern Europe to pick up some spare plutonium for a homemade A-bomb he plans on selling to a splinter group of Israel-hating Iranians with an anti-Obama grudge (they vehemently oppose the recent nuclear treaty), all side bets are off. Rapp, in turn, repeatedly disregards orders, chasing down suspects on foot and via car, infiltrating an arms dealer’s seemingly impregnable hotel suite and dispatching said arms dealer’s henchmen with brutal, ruthless, breathless efficiency with an able assist from a Turkish CIA agent, Annika (Shiva Negar) before inevitably meeting and confronting his shadow (i.e., Ghost) in a predictably effects-driven fight to save the Free World.

Not that we can or should expect anything of any depth, nuance, or complexity from an adaptation of a pulpy action-thriller, especially a pulpy action-thriller written by an openly conservative writer, but that doesn’t absolve either director Michael Cuesta or his screenwriting team from responsibility for American Assassin’s simplistic, reductive, ultimately repulsive subtext.

With a screenplay credited to four writers, including Ed Zwick (Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, Glory) and Marshall Herskovitz (Once and Again, My So-Called Life, thirtysomething), American Assassin unfolds like a right-winger’s wet dream of the United States (“America, F— Yeah!” minus the irony), with Mitch Rapp personifying a deeply reactionary, xenophobic, nihilistic foreign policy. Rapp represents another version of the “ugly American,” going anywhere, doing whatever he wants (usually killing) without legal, ethical, or moral consequences of any kind. Not that we can or should expect anything of any depth, nuance, or complexity from an adaptation of a pulpy action-thriller, especially a pulpy action-thriller written by an openly conservative writer, but that doesn’t absolve either director Michael Cuesta or his screenwriting team from responsibility for American Assassin’s simplistic, reductive, ultimately repulsive subtext. American Assassin may have gone into production as Obama neared the end of his second term in office, but intentionally or not, it was made for the Trump Era.