American Assassin Review: 2 Ups & 8 Downs

1. The Politics Are...Questionable At Best

And finally, the film has a fairly discomforting message at its core, and too often feels like a flag-waving exercise in bloody revenge, a power fantasy where an everyman's lover is murdered, so he becomes a vigilante, gets hired by the CIA and gets to reap bloody vengeance.

Though Michael Keaton's CIA handler will interject every so often to wax philosophical on the morally dubious nature of what agents get up to, it ultimately feels like a surface-level attempt to hang a lampshade over the movie's aforementioned sadistic violence and gleefully vengeful tone.

While the film was marketed as a more intelligent and interesting thriller, it's clearly pandering to the hoo-rah, middle-American crowd at its heart, which should certainly give some potential viewers a moment for pause.

At least something as wantonly xenophobic and hateful as London Has Fallen didn't try to masquerade its true politics, while this feels like a more conceited attempted to espouse similar feelings.

And though American Assassin is basically trash, here's what actually worked...