The American seemed to metformin side effects acne me like the start of Oscar season. George Clooney’s had a great run the last 5 years or so in the eyes of the Academy, and from the trailers I thought we had an interesting character piece about an assassin and his one last job. I was really looking forward to this film purely because of Clooney and this awakening he’s sort of had as an actor since he won Best Supporting for Syriana in 2005. I wasn’t too crazy about that film, but when I saw Clooney in Michael Clayton I felt like I was watching a performer I had never seen before. Clooney still had his Clooney charm, but there was this sadness and weary in his eyes that had previously escaped my attention. I wish that film came out a year earlier or later, because no one had a shot against Daniel Day-Lewis and I would have loved to see Clooney win Best Actor for Clayton.
Anyway, The American seemed like exactly the kind of movie I’d love. The trailer might have seemed somewhat actiony but with European director Anton Corbijn at the helm I knew it was just misleading marketing. I haven’t seen Corbijn’s work before, but I felt like I was in store for a slow moving, deep, character drama about a man coming to grips with moving away from the life he’s always known. That life for Jack/Edward (Clooney) was the life of an assassin, and right away Corbijn shows us the kind of man Jack is when he’s walking in a snow-covered valley and is suddenly attacked by side effects 0f metformin a Swedish sniper, only to quickly get in a position and take him out. I’m in. This already started good. Great way to intro a character and establish who he is.
Jack calls his boss, Pavel (Johan Leysen) to tell him he’s out. He’s sent off by Pavel to spend time in a remote country town of Italy to get away from his Swedish aggressors and do one last job where he doesn’t even have to pull the trigger. Yeah, another “one last job” film. And we see them constantly. Now, there’s no problem with that, but like anything else, you need to separate yourself from all the rest with great characters, great story and an interesting spin. In The American, we don’t really have any of that. While Jack helps prep another assassin for her job by building a weapon, he starts to fall in love with Clara, a local prostitute in town.
As the story progresses, Jack starts to become paranoid he’s still being followed and when he fights off another Swede assassin, begins to think Clara or someone else is in on it. Corbijn tries to keep us guessing and tries to keep us on edge with Jack as a character, but we really never know anything about him. We don’t know what happened in Sweden, or wherever it was that got the Swedes coming after him. Corbijn briefly touches on a subplot of prostitutes being killed in a newspaper article Jack reads, but there’s never anything more and only serves as a weak plot device later on.
Corbijn & Clooney on set
Corbijn simply never does enough to make anything about this story interesting. It’s so predictable and step-by-step basic to the formula that it’s almost like unintentional reverse psychology where you think that it’s unpredictable because he can’t possibly be directing a film so uninspired by anything of interest. European films are known to have more of a character driven style, which is exactly why I love so many European films. I love slow, methodical character building, and in Europe they’re often superior to most you’ll see come out of the US. But here that was simply non-existent. There were no real moments of worth. Nothing out of the ordinary that you wouldn’t expect to see in this type of story to get you involved.
While Clooney still put on a pretty solid performance, there just never felt like he had much to work with. As far as we’re concerned, Jack had no past. All we see is his present, and without contextual reference for what brought him to this point, it’s hard to get on board for the ride. It’s simply too slow, with too many small moments of irrelevance that seem to be an attempt at character building subtlety. But I’m an avid Mad Men watcher, and I see character building subtlety used to perfection every Sunday for 13 weeks out of the year. This, my friends, is not that.
Overall: 4/10
Directed by Anton Corbijn. Adapted for the Screen by Rowan Joffe. Cinematography by Martin Ruhe. Edited by Andrew Hulme. Original Music by Herbert Grönemeyer. Production Design by Mark Digby. Casting by Béatrice Kruger.
Starring: George Clooney, Violante Placido, Thekla Reuten, Johan Leysen & Paolo Bonacelli
