‘American Assassin’ close-mouthed and macho – Nicholson unforgettable in ‘Now’
This news has been read 4079 times!
For a significant portion of “Who Are We Now,” an exemplary indie drama from writer-director Matthew Newton (“From Nowhere”), the lives of its two main characters never intersect, almost to the point where it feels like two short stories that are barely tethered together. This is a risky narrative strategy, to say the least, but it also reveals the depth of Newton’s commitment: He wants the audience to understand these two women completely — their jobs, their families, their turbulent emotional states — before they get to know each other. By the time that finally happens, the stakes are extraordinarily high and the performances, by Julianne Nicholson and Emma Roberts, have a combined power that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Low-concept, modestly scaled indies are always a hard sell, but authentic passion and a steady accumulation of detail sets “Who We Are Now” apart.
Recently released from prison after a long stretch, Beth (Nicholson) wants desperately to reconnect with her son, but her sister Gabby (Jess Weixler) and her husband have taken over as the child’s legal guardians and they’re not convinced she’s ready to share custody. Beth has no relationship with the boy, who calls her “Auntie” and treats her like a stranger, and she doesn’t help her case by showing up for unannounced visits and causing a scene. Her troubled past tends to scare off potential employers, so for now she logs time at a nail salon while pressing her pro-bono attorney (Jimmy Smits) to argue for a better custody arrangement. She may be in the right, but her tempestuous personality constantly threatens to be her undoing.
Meanwhile, at the same public defense clinic where Beth’s case is being handled, Jess (Roberts) is busy representing a juvenile inmate who’s offered a scholarship to finish her high-school education, but gets some pushback from a judge who’s worried about her propensity toward violence. Jess loves the work and fights tenaciously for her clients, but she clashes constantly with her mother (Lea Thompson), who feels the long hours and lousy pay are a waste of a law degree. After a tragic setback at the office leaves her questioning her career path, Jess looks for a case that will reignite her conviction. She finds it in Beth, another beleaguered fighter looking for the path forward.
Newton adds compelling character dimension for everyone in the supporting cast: Smits as a veteran public defender who both encourages the much less experienced Jess and braces her with a splash of cold water when necessary; Zachary Quinto as a local barfly who turns a one-night-stand with Beth into a more lasting partnership, but struggles with PTSD after multiple tours in Afghanistan; and Thompson and Weixler as women who set themselves against our two heroines, but not to the point where their concerns are delegitimized. Each role has been thought through with a little more dignity and care than expected; the film wins a game of inches.
Concerning
Ultimately, though, “Who We Are Now” belongs to Nicholson, who resists the urge to turn Beth into a more ingratiating soul. There’s a danger to Beth that’s real and concerning to the judge, her sister and us: a hardness and quick temper that’s surely been worsened in prison and makes her potentially unfit to be a mother. The title could be read as aspirational — as in, not who we are in the past — but it could also be a barometer on Beth’s progress as a stable, functioning member of society. Nicholson lends Beth a flawed nobility that puts equal emphasis on both readings, at least until a wrenching final scene reveals her true nature. Newton has made a beautiful little film about sacrifice and redemption, and he earns it one tiny brushstroke at a time.
“American Assassin,” directed by Michael Cuesta, aims to be the first in a new action franchise inspired by author Vince Flynn’s best-selling pulp about hot-headed, CIA-adjacent brute Mitch Rapp, the kind of terrorist-killing tough guy whose bleeds koans like, “If you’re not busy living, you’re dying.” The 16-installment book series is a smart choice to adapt. It’s “Jack Reacher” meets “Lone Survivor,” and so apolitical that both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were fans.
Rapp sneers at everyone: bureaucrats, all religions, the French. This launchpad has big ambitions and a whirlwind script where bullets zing in Malta, Ibiza, Istanbul, Tripoli, Romania, Roanoke and Rome. Yet “American Assassin” is so close-mouthed and macho that it blends in with Bourne, Bond and “Taken’s” Brian Mills. Rapp can blast his way through Turkey — but this sullen, swollen hero can’t elbow those box office heavyweights to make room.
To give the franchise youth, Cuesta (“Kill the Messenger”) and his team of screenwriters headed by “The Americans’” Stephen Schiff age down Rapp several decades. Instead of a grizzled professional forged when his high school sweetheart died in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, this Rapp was a 10-year-old on 9/11. When the film starts, he’s a naive, soft-bellied millennial, played by “Teen Wolf’s” Dylan O’Brien, proposing to his girlfriend Katrina (Charlotte Vega) on a Spanish beach.
Rapp and his now-fiancee haven’t gotten to clink cocktails when Muslim terrorists led by Adnan Al-Mansur (Shahid Ahmed) machine-gun the resort. Tourist corpses flop onto white outdoor mattresses. Katrina is pierced through the heart, dead-center of her innocent white bikini. And when “American Assassin” picks up 18 months later, Rapp is back home where he’s mutated into a muscle-studded, wanna-be murderer. In order to infiltrate Al-Mansur’s cell and avenge his girlfriend’s execution, he’s grown a beard and 30 pounds of abs, plus trained himself in guns, throwing stars, MMA fighting and Islamic scripture. “I am ready to go on vacation,” he types to the Tripoli-based terrorists. It’s uncertain if the irony is intentional.
Naturally, his late-night chats flag the attention of CIA Deputy director Irene Kennedy (Sanaa Lathan), who does the sensible thing when one discovers a temperamental, traumatized, monomaniacal rebel: She trusts him to save the world. The film trusts him less, layering flickers of Al-Mansur’s face over other strangers when Rapp shoots to kill. In a virtual reality training sequence, Rapp fires at a hologram of Al-Mansur even when he knows the battery pack he’s wearing will punish him with a violent shock, like a rat who refuses to learn. (RTRS)
His assigned ex-Navy SEAL instructor Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton), a Persian Gulf vet who wakes up his students with gunfire, doesn’t trust him at all, and with good reason: This crazy kid reminds him of his last unhinged prodigy (Taylor Kitsch), a madman currently brokering plutonium deals in Poland. A deeper film might underline the sour joke that this angry American who wants to kill Muslims discovers his real enemy is a second angry American created by a third. This film doesn’t want it’s catharsis to get too complicated.
“American Assassin” can’t capture the grit in Flynn’s intensely researched books, which President Bush once called “a little too accurate.” (The author died of cancer in 2013.) Like Tom Cruise’s Reacher films, the character’s quick brain doesn’t translate from page to screen. He’s the strutting, silent embodiment of, “Come at me, bro,” a generic goon except for the shaggy hair and stubble that makes him look like a drummer who got on the wrong tour bus. The script doesn’t even try to give him an interior life; he’s essentially born on that Spanish beach like a dragon from an egg, and his fiancee’s sole character trait is “blonde.”
This news has been read 4079 times!
