American Assassin  ★★½

AFTER a promising start, American Assassin gradually slides into familiar action territory.

In the tranquil waters off a crowded Spanish beach resort, a young American tourist proposes to his girlfriend. He leaves her swimming while he rushes off to get celebratory drinks from the pool bar.

Suddenly the sound of automatic gunfire shatters the moment. A group of terrorists proceed to mow down as many tourists as possible in a sudden, ruthless attack. He is injured but his five-minute fiancee is one of the many dead.

He becomes obsessed with revenge, immersing himself in Muslim teachings and weapons training in a belief that he will be able to single-handedly infiltrate and eliminate one terrorist cell after another, including her killer.

At this point I was in, hoping the film would continue down this interesting path, even though it is a ridiculously naive plan (on both the character’s part and mine).

He has some initial success that brings him to the attention of the CIA and he eventually becomes part of an elite, covert team on a mission to stop a massive bombing, unfortunately putting us back on the straight and familiar narrative highway from A to B.

As a result, we get a reasonable action film; no more, no less, with a couple of interesting twists but also full of the usual leaps of logic over plot holes (How did he climb five storeys in a few seconds? Can you really carry a plutonium bomb over your shoulder in a duffel bag?)

Also, what’s with an action movie not having a car chase? That like going to a zoo and not seeing an elephant.

Director Michael Cuesta previously made Kill The Messenger (2014) which I liked, but that had a much better script.

American Assassin appears to have had talented writers but development by committee (never a good thing) with four sets of hands adapting the original Vince Flynn novel.

So, in front of the camera there are some exciting action sequences, including an interesting explosion effect, and a couple of useful character twists, but the main problem is lead Dylan O’Brien as Mitch Rapp. If the film had gone down the path of revenge-filed amateur vigilante I think he would have been fine.

But it doesn’t and so never does O’Brien’s character convince as somebody an elite, covert group of professionals would want in their ranks. In fact his constant ignorance of orders because he ultimately “gets the results” starts to become annoying and repetitive.

Michael Keaton is solid as Stan Hurley, head of the CIA team, but his allegedly hard-arse, legendary character is constantly undermined by his acceptance of Rapp’s beaviour and the constant admonishments of his and the CIA boss.

In contrast to O’Brien, another young actor comes into the film later on and acquits himself pretty well as a villain (I won’t say who).

But finally there is Scott Adkins. Where do I start with this walking wood heap. Minus any acting talent, he has managed to pull together more than 50 credits now. Go figure. He barely says a word in this film, which is one thing the writers got right.

Watching the film, the locations also troubled me. England, Italy, Spain, Poland, Belgium; it looked like no expense was spared in flying around the world, but the settings are under-used.

Answer: the film was actually only filmed in London, Rome and Malta.