Your standard George Clooney character is a smooth, sexy, professional bachelor. He typically has no familial or romantic attachments, is committed to non-commitment, has zero paternal instincts, marital cold feet, and whatever yearnings he has to "be with someone" continuously clash with his need to be professionally distant. "Up In the Air", "The American", "Intolerable Cruelty", "Out of Sight", "Batman and Robin", "Burn After Reading" etc all see Clooney playing the same character, which itself echoes his famous off-screen bachelorhood.
"The American" find Clooney playing "Jack", a professional hit-man who is hiding in a small Italian town until the heat from his last job blows over. Whilst laying low, he tentatively forges a relationship with Clara, a beautiful local prostitute. Their romantic affair is inter-cut with sequences in which Jack is contracted to build a sniper rifle for another local assassin. The film ends with Swedish gangsters, whom Jack ticked off on a previous job, locating him in Italy. Jack defeats these gangsters and makes hasty preparations to flee with Clara into a life of peace and quiet, but of course dies before he can reach her.
"The American" works well as a sedate thriller, but its comprised almost entirely of clichés: the kind hearted assassin who loves butterflies, the introspective, gentle, emotionally wounded hit-man who refuses to connect with people, the beautiful prostitute with a heart of gold, the "last job before retirement" cliché, the "hero dying before he reaches the girl" cliché, the "wise priest who talks about morality and spews half-baked wisdom about sin and fate" cliché etc etc. Those familiar with hit-man movies will also recognise whole chunks of "The American" lifted from other films: the film's climax plays like Antonioni's "The Passenger" meets "Carlito's Way", the film's style is Jean Pierre Melville's "Le Samourai" and Dassin's "Riffi", its gun assembly is "The Day of he Jackal", its plot is almost exactly "The Mechanic" and "Hard Contract", its assassin vs assassin climax is everything from "Assassins" to "Jason Bourne" and it at times resembles westerns like "The Gunfighter". Stoic hit-man movies in which kind hearted assassins "do good" and "bond with marginalised women" are also a staple in Asian cinema. See, for example, anything directed by or starring Takeshi Kitano. And of course Jack's central dilemma is essentially Robert DeNiro's in "Heat". It is against Jack's professional judgement to be with Clara – it is his personal code to avoid all personal attachments – but he nevertheless gives in to his shaky desires, which of course disrupts his life and fatally cracks his cool.
But while almost everything in the film is derivative, director Anton Corbijn seems to realise that such pulpy material demands a certain amount of familiarity. It's all about tone and convention, Corbjin trying to homage 1960s crime thrillers ("Point Blank", "Hard Contract" etc), update them with modern violence and drop the irony of modern hit-man movies ("Grosse Point Blank", "In Bruges", "Ghost Dog", "Limits of Control", "The Matador"). Along these pulpy lines the film works well, though Gorbijn can't quite conjure up the foreboding, portentous tone he's hoping to. He's aiming for a kind of Gothic western or noirish fatality, but the film's too slack for this. Clooney's inevitable demise is corny rather than possesses gravity.
Cinema loves romanticising hit men and hookers (in real life, assassins are horrible and thuggish, and hookers are far less glamorous). Both jobs require one to be dispassionate, distant, non-committed and removed, neither hit-man or hooker able to risk forging a relationship with the target. Audiences love this distance/anonymity, wish for it themselves, which "The American" milks hard.
8/10 - Worth one viewing.
"The American" find Clooney playing "Jack", a professional hit-man who is hiding in a small Italian town until the heat from his last job blows over. Whilst laying low, he tentatively forges a relationship with Clara, a beautiful local prostitute. Their romantic affair is inter-cut with sequences in which Jack is contracted to build a sniper rifle for another local assassin. The film ends with Swedish gangsters, whom Jack ticked off on a previous job, locating him in Italy. Jack defeats these gangsters and makes hasty preparations to flee with Clara into a life of peace and quiet, but of course dies before he can reach her.
"The American" works well as a sedate thriller, but its comprised almost entirely of clichés: the kind hearted assassin who loves butterflies, the introspective, gentle, emotionally wounded hit-man who refuses to connect with people, the beautiful prostitute with a heart of gold, the "last job before retirement" cliché, the "hero dying before he reaches the girl" cliché, the "wise priest who talks about morality and spews half-baked wisdom about sin and fate" cliché etc etc. Those familiar with hit-man movies will also recognise whole chunks of "The American" lifted from other films: the film's climax plays like Antonioni's "The Passenger" meets "Carlito's Way", the film's style is Jean Pierre Melville's "Le Samourai" and Dassin's "Riffi", its gun assembly is "The Day of he Jackal", its plot is almost exactly "The Mechanic" and "Hard Contract", its assassin vs assassin climax is everything from "Assassins" to "Jason Bourne" and it at times resembles westerns like "The Gunfighter". Stoic hit-man movies in which kind hearted assassins "do good" and "bond with marginalised women" are also a staple in Asian cinema. See, for example, anything directed by or starring Takeshi Kitano. And of course Jack's central dilemma is essentially Robert DeNiro's in "Heat". It is against Jack's professional judgement to be with Clara – it is his personal code to avoid all personal attachments – but he nevertheless gives in to his shaky desires, which of course disrupts his life and fatally cracks his cool.
But while almost everything in the film is derivative, director Anton Corbijn seems to realise that such pulpy material demands a certain amount of familiarity. It's all about tone and convention, Corbjin trying to homage 1960s crime thrillers ("Point Blank", "Hard Contract" etc), update them with modern violence and drop the irony of modern hit-man movies ("Grosse Point Blank", "In Bruges", "Ghost Dog", "Limits of Control", "The Matador"). Along these pulpy lines the film works well, though Gorbijn can't quite conjure up the foreboding, portentous tone he's hoping to. He's aiming for a kind of Gothic western or noirish fatality, but the film's too slack for this. Clooney's inevitable demise is corny rather than possesses gravity.
Cinema loves romanticising hit men and hookers (in real life, assassins are horrible and thuggish, and hookers are far less glamorous). Both jobs require one to be dispassionate, distant, non-committed and removed, neither hit-man or hooker able to risk forging a relationship with the target. Audiences love this distance/anonymity, wish for it themselves, which "The American" milks hard.
8/10 - Worth one viewing.