User Reviews

Scenery in movie is beautiful, Clara's boobs and Clooney's back/ push ups are fine, but there is no real content.

Who is Clooney's character? Good mechanic, either with cars or with guns, good marksman. Something more? No information at all.

Where is he from? America. How old is he? Unknown. Has he been married? Unknown. Where he learned his skills? Unknown. Who are his customers? Unknown. Who wants to kill him? Guys from Sweden. Why? Unknown. Who is Pavel? Unknown. Why Pavel wants to kill him? Unknown.

What you can see in this movie besides nice boobs and male back? Not much. Man who is supposedly former assassin who wants to retire, but there is nowhere to run, and nobody to trust. Does that sound real? So - so. Material for 95 minutes movie? Can be. Laid out in this way so viewers have no information about anything? Definitely not.

If story have been laid out a bit different, so we could learn something, anything about Jack/Edward/Clooney, and empathize with him. That would take 5 minutes, one dialogue at most, and without that explanation result is crap. This movie is like Marcel Proust meets the James Bond, but we do not know anything about what Proust is thinking about, and James Bond is almost broken guy who do not know what he wants. Clooney in this movies is like Coca Cola without bubbles, known brand who made such lousy product so you are sorry you lost 95 minutes watching.

This review is already longer than "The American" script, "sapienti sat".

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.

Here we go again, another group of self proclaimed "intellectuals" see a movie they don't understand and call it Brilliant! Give me a break; this is without a doubt one of the most "BORING" movies of all time. Just as a reality check, I'll explain the movie. Clooney failed miserably at trying to make a artsy European thriller. While all the acting was good, most of the movie drags on horribly, and is full of holes. The only good part was the first 5-minutes and if Clooney was shot in that sequence, ending the movie, then I would have left the theater more satisfied. As far as the plot, well lets start with Clooney making a weapon with "the capacity of a sub-machine gun but the range of a rifle" - it's called an M14 and has been around since the 1960s. In fact when Clooney finished building the gun I turned to my wife (who fell asleep a few times during the movie) and said "congratulations you just built and M14 with a retractable stock." Later in the movie he admits to the shooter that the gun is a modified M14. So why would a covert operation need a gunsmith to build a specialized gun in a remote part of Italy when the gun can be purchased off the rack and modified with a retractable stock in someone's basement? Or better yet, instead of modifying a classic M14 (with the wooden forearm) just purchase a modern day KART M14 EBR Airsoft Sniper Rifle, which has the retractable stock as standard equipment. You would think these "covert professionals" would know this, and the studio would have done their research to make the plot as realistic as possible. Then having to fit the M14 in a large Samsonite briefcase so the female shooter can carry it without raising suspicion. When was the last time you saw a female executive carry a large, black,Samsonite briefcase? I don't know about anyone else, but having some background in surveillance this would have made the shooter stick out like a sore thumb. If I spec'd this operation (assuming it wasn't a long distance shoot, which is wasn't when she tried to shoot Clooney) I would have gone with a Heckler & Koch MP5 with the optional scope, which could have easily fit into a woman's portfolio case. Let's not forget the CGI butterflies,which made me think I was watching Avatar for a brief moment. Of course I'm just picking at technicalities, which have nothing to do with why this movie failed so miserably at providing entertainment value. Lately the movie studios have been cracking down on people that download movies. Maybe people wouldn't be downloading these movies if they got their money's worth when they pay $28 to see garbage like the American.

Do not let the trailers fool you, there is about 10mins total of action in this film. The bulk of this film is long shots of Clooney, coming to grasp with his life and going about completing his last job.

The landscapes are breathtaking. The action is sparse with more of a dread sense than any real kind of action. But then again, this film presents the life of an assassin more the way it probably is. Not a lot of flash, just a lot of looking over your shoulder, day to day mundane mixed in with an occasional beat of action.

Clooney is fantastic here. Gone is the swagger and charm of characters he has played in the past. He shows here why he is today one of our best actors. The rest of the cast is relative unknown Italian actors. All wonderfully cast and wonderfully subtle yet dis-alarmingly complex. Violante Placido is wonderful as Clooney's love interest "Carla". Paolo Bonacelli as Father Benedetto gives the film its polar opposite to Clooney and Bonacelli is wonderfully reserved yet bold in his performance.

The film is not one for everyone, it is, as I titled this review, a slow burn. The opening scene sets things up with you really not too sure just what is going on and in the end, you are still not quite sure what the final outcome is. Make no mistake, this is a film that must be digested slowly with no expectation of explosions and gun play galore.

For those who are fans of Clooney or director Anton Corbijn, a must see. The casual viewer will probably want to wait. This is a high art film that will probably not be to the taste of the casual cinema goer. But if you appreciate technique, then perhaps this film may be to your liking.

Do you really need to know anything else about this movie? Because that's actually the only thing of any consequence that happens in it: boobs. AND I'm gay and therefore don't care about boobs, at least in my walking-around, plain old daily life when I'm not thinking about how important they are for nourishing babies or whatever. Which happens, tops - TOPS - maybe three times a week, maybe more if I happen to be at a carnival. Anyway, that should tell you something about how hard-pressed I am to come up with a raison d'etre for this movie.

Really, though, "The American" is a two-hour snoozefest about George Clooney alternately exercising, performing cunnilingus, looking wary, and occasionally (though not NEARLY often enough to generate anything approaching excitement) getting shot at. In Italy, for no discernible reason except that, perhaps, the director (Anton Corbijn, which looks like "Anton Corbin" with a sneeze in it) had some Italian friends to whom he owed favors. Except that half of them (there are about four people in this movie) play Swedes. I dunno; YOU try to understand it. All I know is that I left the theater not understanding anything more (of any consequence, anyway) about GC's character, including little things like, you know, WHO HE WAS OR WHAT HE WAS DOING OR (hahaha) WHY.

Well, we do find out at one point that he makes guns. Because that's what he spends most of the movie doing. Like, a lot. For interminable amounts of time, to the point where I began to get the feeling that Cor-sneeze-bin has a Tom Clancyesque fetish for the minutiae of mechanical processes, esp. regarding weapons. So when he's not feeling up/falling in love with the local strumpet, doing pull-ups in his tiny little villa/hotel-room, or meaninglessly chatting up a local priest who looks like Jabba the Hutt only with less defined facial features, he's making a gun. For someone else. Who

(spoiler) (as if you care)

never even gets to use it. In fact, that's what this whole movie feels like: never-gets-to- use-it.

So George, please, the next time you read a script that says "mercilessly bangs hot Italian chick in delicious red bordello-lighting", please keep it in your pants for long enough to realize that THE ENTIRE FILM IS A BAG OF CRAP.

Namaste.