American Assassin Is A Stupid Movie
We should probably stop making war propaganda films.
Dylan O’Brien, former teen fantasy dream boat from that show Teen Wolf (Which is somehow STILL on air!) is the star of the new film American Assassin. His character, Mitch Rapp (terrible character name!) is a young CIA operative looking for revenge after somebody he loves is killed by terrorists. He teams up with a veteran of the Cold War to fight extremism and prevent a global nuclear war. Of course, their targets are Middle Eastern.
In short, it’s a stupid movie. American Assassin is an American disaster, a film encapsulating some of the worst traits of American mindsets and American policy.
The film pushes this sort of vengeful, bloody fight against terrorists and in doing so recasts a fantasy world where the Middle East is harboring weapons of mass destruction. It’s a film that pairs American exceptionalism with American imperialism masked as spreading democracy. CIA operatives sanctioned to work with other governments to coordinate assassinations that throw entire countries into chaos are the good guys.
The first thirty seconds of this trailer were leading me to believe we were about to see Dylan O’Brien get arrested. But of course not. Crazy, revenge driven, ideology fueled men intent on murdering those who go against their own belief system are fine if they are employed by the CIA.
90% of the plot of this film is rooted in Tucker Carlson’s brand of lazy, calculated paranoia about the great foreign unknown. At best the movie is just not good, and at worst it’s Islamophobic, pro-U.S. Military propaganda that allows uneducated Americans watch brown people die on screen with some false sense of moral superiority.
It’s like American Sniper, except, instead of being loosely based on the war crimes of an American soldier, its just conjured half-assed Dick Cheney style fearmongering. As Emily Yoshida wrote for Vulture: “It’s aggressively, flagrantly not a movie we need right now.”
So maybe Hollywood, and CBS studios more specifically, should tone it down on the types of films that present the American worldview as so wildly naive and revenge driven. That kind of American governance is what drove the world to where it is now.
