American Assassin

“American Assassin uses Islam as a convenient shorthand for terrorism and evil, yet it’s conspicuously absent in ‘good’ characters from Iran.”

Title: American Assassin (2017)
Director: Michael Cuesta 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writers: Stephen Schiff 👨🏼🇺🇸, Michael Finch 👨🏼🇺🇸, Edward Zwick 👨🏼🇺🇸, and Marshall Herskovitz 👨🏼🇺🇸

Reviewed by Dara Khan 👨🏽🇺🇸🌈♿

Note: This review was commissioned by Lionsgate. The content and methodology remain 100% independent and in line with Mediaversity's non-commissioned reviews.

—SPOILERS AHEAD—

Technical: 1.5/5

The end of the Jason Bourne series left a vacuum in the airport-paperback-turned-espionage-thriller genre, but American Assassin will not be the film to fill its shoes. Based on a novel by Vince Flynn, the caricatures and clichés run deeper than the story in this adaptation. Michael Cuesta’s gritty direction shows occasional hints of style, but visually, American Assassin is more reminiscent of network TV than a big-screen blockbuster. Stars Dylan O’Brien and Michael Keaton put in solid performances despite the lackluster script, but they can’t keep this sinking ship afloat.

Gender: 2/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE

American Assassin is a flat-out failure when it comes to the portrayal of women. The film’s three female characters exist solely as foils to the emotions of our protagonist, Mitch Rapp (O’Brien). The women never cross paths during the film, each existing in a discrete bubble of the story, and two are violently killed simply to raise the emotional stakes. Special agent Annika (Shiva Negar) gets a few high-octane action moments, but is never allowed to outshine Rapp, remaining firmly relegated to a sub-sidekick position. American Assassin centers men in its action and emotional storytelling, and neglects women in the process.

Race: 2/5

Islamophobia refers to prejudice based on religion, but it’s also based on heavily racialized ideas about Muslims. Those ideas rear their ugly heads in American Assassin, where the Middle Eastern characters have very little personality outside of the simple good guy/bad guy axis on which the film places them. They are mostly terrorists and tyrants, with two notable exceptions of sympathetic figures whose political goals just happen to align with those of our heroes—but they prove disposable anyway. The only villain given real character development is a white man, a rogue operative known as Ghost (Taylor Kitsch). I haven’t seen nuance this lacking since the Bush era.

Meanwhile they are pitted against mostly-white American heroes. Irene Kennedy (Sanaa Lathan), who plays Mitch Rapp’s CIA handler, is the sole Black member of the main cast and confined to a minimal role. Often, action cinema makes room for Black characters but puts them in positions of stunted authority; they play the white hero’s superior officer, but simply end up serving as a foil. Recent examples include Morgan Freeman’s President Trumbull in Angel Has Fallen (2019), Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury in the Marvel universe, and Common in the naval thriller Hunter Killer (2018). Irene Kennedy is the latest in that dubious legacy.

Deduction for Religion: -0.50

American Assassin gets an additional deduction thanks to the Islamophobic caricatures described above. Islam is used as a convenient shorthand for terrorism and evil when it suits the filmmakers, yet conspicuously absent in “good” characters from Iran, a country with a Muslim majority and an Islamic government. Whatever those characters’ relationship with Islam is, we never find out. It is depicted solely as a sinister force behind terrorist acts.

Mediaversity Grade: F 1.67/5

American Assassin centers the emotions and actions of white men, doing so along “Us vs. Them” political lines that villainize non-white characters and pin women to the periphery. These gendered and racialized power fantasies may still be popular in the world of airport fiction, but the landscape of film and television is evolving past them. Michael Cuesta and his screenwriters should take note.

Like American Assassin? Try these other espionage thrillers.

Grade: FLiSeptember 6, 2017