What type of man is willing to kill for his country without putting on a uniform? Kennedy finds him in the wake of the Pan Am Lockerbie terrorist attack. Stansfield directs his protégé, Irene Kennedy, and his old Cold War colleague Stan Hurley to form a new group of clandestine operatives who will work outside the normal chain of command - men who do not exist. The rise of Islamic terrorism is coming, and it needs to be met abroad before it reaches America's shores. Cold War veteran and CIA operations director Thomas Stansfield knows he must prepare his people for the next war. Two decades of cutthroat partisan politics has left the CIA and the country in an increasingly vulnerable position. The scruffy O’Brien (MTV’s “Teen Wolf,” the “Maze Runner” movies) has the rebel action hero look down, but “American Assassin” is bogged down by its contrived, empty-headed script (credited to four screenwriters and less than the sum of its parts) and its macho chest beating.Before he was considered a CIA superagent, before he was thought of as a terrorist's worst nightmare, and before he was both loathed and admired by the politicians on Capitol Hill, Mitch Rapp was a gifted college athlete without a care in the world.and then tragedy struck. “American Assassin” is based on Vince Flynn’s series of series of spy novels - there are 16 in total - and is the first chapter of a potential Mitch Rapp franchise.

Rapp is a natural - “he’s testing through the roof!” - and soon he’s off to stop the detonation of a nuclear bomb, which is in the hands of “Ghost” (Taylor Kitsch), a former student of Hurley’s who’s gone bad. His online activity gets him flagged by the CIA, who invite him to an secret, elite training program, headed up by Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton, always awesome, even in this terrain). But before he can even post the video to Instagram, his world flips when terrorists storm the beach and begin indiscriminately gunning down beachgoers, including his fiance of about four minutes.Ĭut to 18 months later and Rapp has styled himself into a killing machine ready to take on the terrorists his damn self.

Annoyingly, he’s using his phone to film himself proposing to her, so immediately you kind of hate the guy. Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’Brien) is on vacation with his girlfriend in Ibiza when he decides to pop the question. A little bit Jason Bourne, a little bit Jack Reacher, a little bit any other rogue hero you can think of, “Assassin” suffers from its self-seriousness and a sense that we’ve been here and seen this before. “American Assassin” is a tough-talking, scowling and ultimately generic action thriller assembled from the spare parts of other action thrillers.

American assassin book review