Like the Jason Bourne and Jack Reacher faithful, fans of avenging hero Mitch Rapp have been waiting a long time to see late author Vince Flynn's best-selling creation on the big screen.
After watching American Assassin they would have been happy to hang on another 18 years.
This is one of those sum-of-its-parts mysteries where it seemed harder to make a bad thriller than a good one. The Maze Runner's Dylan O'Brien can hack it (literally) as a tough guy; he has Michael Keaton as his show-no-mercy mentor and director Michael Cuesta was behind the lens for Homeland and the much-admired Kill the Messenger. That's quite the troika, but saving this movie proves to be harder than saving the world.
The big problems are a script that thinks too big, confuses fast-moving with rushed and has a non-event nemesis whose plan for revenge is surprisingly similar to Bond villain bombast. Somewhere between Warsaw, Istanbul, Rome and London England, a fluffy white cat is in need of a good home...
While there are a couple of decent scraps (luxury apartments, hotel rooms - you know the playbook), American Assassin never manages to measure up to even second-tier stuff like Spy Game, The Recruit and The Gunman. As for the ending, well; an alternate cut of Die Hard, where it turned out the gang in Nakatomi Plaza were really aliens and the complex was a long-lost spaceship, would be easier to forgive.
A bad Rapp indeed.
