If The American was anything, it was predictable. It was much more than that; in fact many of the adjectives I would use to describe it would be positive. But the beats of the story are ones you've seen a thousand times. I won't spoil the ending or anything, but it barely matters. If you've ever watched a movie about a hitman before, you've more or less seen The American, whether it's In Bruges or Blast Of Silence or Le Samourai or The Killer. I enjoyed all of those films more than The American, but this film (hell, this genre), is rarely one that you visit for the plot. Above all, The American is a mood piece, as tightly wound, effortlessly professional and quietly hollow as it's protagonist.
George Clooney plays Jack, a meticulously professional assassin who is sent to a small Italian town by his handler to hide out following a violent incident in Sweden. There, Jack befriends an elderly priest and begins a romance with a warm-hearted prostitute named Clara. He also begins building a customized rifle for a new client, a fellow assassin named Mathilde. As Jack attempts to reexamine his old life, his new one is threatened by retaliation for the incident in Sweden as well as new threats from unexpected sources.
See? Familiar, isn't it? Trite, even? Absolutely. However, the worthiness of The American lies not in its plotting or its scripting or even its acting, but the direction. Corbijn shows his European roots (he directed the 2006 Best Foreign Film winner, The Lives Of Others) by crafting a methodical, icy thriller in which the glacial pace is made all the more agonizing by the blink-and-you'll-miss-it bursts of violence that punctuate the film. The film is almost two hours, but I wouldn't be surprised if the script was about 50 pages. The dialogue is direct and to the point and Corbijn isn't afraid to include natural pauses that last for so long, they almost become unnatural. Despite it's realism, the movie becomes almost dream-like by the end, as you get more and more entrenched in Clooney's headspace.
Speaking of which. For a guy who's so handsome and charming, Clooney has a surprising amount of range. You've got suave, smarmy Clooney (the Ocean's movies, Out Of Sight), goofy Clooney (his work with the Coen Brothers) and serious, grim Clooney (Syriana, Michael Clayton). He plays all of these types pretty well, and in The American he takes his serious, grim performance to it's extreme. It's a deceptively tough role to pull off too. The stoic badass seems pretty basic, but Jack is given very little dialogue to work with and is shown to be particularly heinous at the beginning of the film (in a sad, brutal scene that is stunning just by virtue of it's nonchalance). Clooney still manages to create an evolution for the character though, and by the end of the film I was really pulling for him.
The rest of the cast is pretty solid as well. LOST fans will recognize Mathilde (who's name, I think is a reference to The Professional) as the woman Sayid encounters in his flashforward and the woman playing the prostitute also managed to do a lot with a pretty thankless role. I wasn't really sold on the priest character, mostly because he seemed to exist only as an excuse for Jack to cryptically wax philosophical about his job.
All in all, I'd recommend this movie, just don't go into it expecting an action move because...it's totally not. Definitely more of a mood piece. Or if you just like seeing George Clooney looking pensive and sad.
UP NEXT: A way less pretentious review. Mystery Team! Also, Game Of Thrones starts in less than a month! Get psyched!
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