American Assassin Review

As I continue to catch up on getting reviews posted to the blog, here's a little movie that popped up a couple weeks back called American Assassin. This is apparently based on a book series that I unfortunately haven't read so I can't comment on how well it was adapted, but essentially they want this character Mitch Rapp to be your new Jack Ryan.

This is another one where a trailer actually got me into the theater. It had a reasonably interesting premise: a guy decides to personally go kill every terrorist he can find after they murder his fiancé, and in the process he runs into professional terrorist-killer Michael Keaton, who as these things go runs a secret terrorist-killing unit for the government and is forced to train Rapp to do it the right way.

The main danger with that kind of trailer is of course that Keaton could be nothing more than a glorified cameo in a bad B-movie. Fortunately he wasn't, but unfortunately, it's not enough to save this movie from mediocrity. So let's talk about why American Assassin made me cranky::

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