Directed by Anton Corbijn (who made the excellent Joy Division biopic Control) and starring George Clooney. The American is a very slow burn take on a conventional assassin-tries-to-leave-life-of-crime-behind movie. It’s a slow, tense and arresting movie. After a stunning opening sequence, from which you feel like almost ANYTHING could happen, we follow Clooney’s ‘American’ into hiding in a small Italian town. The slowness of the film works very nicely from here on in, ratcheting up and grinding out the tension toward the movie’s inevitable finale.
In parts it is reminiscent of The Day of the Jackal, as Jack/Edward (Clooney) slowly constructs and tests the weapon he is building. His assassin’s life is one of meticulous solitude, and Corbijn makes the construction of this fearsome bespoke weapon look like beautiful craftsmanship in the hands of a master artisan.
Clooney’s character is a total blank. By the end of the movie we know virtually nothing more about him than we did at the start, other than a few (mostly implied) base facts. We learn early on that he is a solitary man, who will make the necessary hard decisions in order to keep things that way. However as he whiles away the days in the sleepy Italian town, his final job seeing him fashion a weapon in isolated seclusion, against his better judgement he finds himself with not only a friend, in the shape of the portly local priest; but also a super hot Italian sexpot girlfriend (Violante Placido) who lives her life with a typically Euro ‘clothes optional’ outlook.
Anton Corbijn has, unsurprisingly, a great eye for the visual. Whether the camera is lingering on Clooney’s impressive exercise regimen, peering through a car windshield at a motorway tunnel for a striking credit sequence, or taking in a bird’s eye view of the stunning Italian landscapes - like a feature film version of the ‘Earth From Above’ book – the film is quite often fantastic to look at. If the story itself is perhaps a tad generic – hitman trying to leave ‘the life’ – then it is done with a panache that renders any genre staples as merely minor concerns.
Some berk in the cinema loudly denounced it as ‘shit’ the minute the credits rolled, but the more I think back on this movie, the more I like it. It’s almost like an art house action movie! For all of it’s slow pace, the attention never wanders, and at the end of it we are left with an enigmatic, stylish take on the hit man movie.
IMDB: The American
