The American: Review

Okay. Seriously. Is the film industry just purposely releasing all their shitty movies this year?

Clooney! What did you do? Why dude why? You had such a great year last year. You know I was really looking forward to see George Clooney do another heavy drama like Syriana again. And I wasn't the only one, this film has been lauded as one of the front runners for the Oscars next year and boy, all that just turn out to be shit.

The American is about Jack played by George Clooney who is an assassin building a gun for another assassin, while he is hiding out in Italy after he was nearly executed in Sweden. And as the film progresses he meets and develops a relationship with a hooker but paranoia soon engulfs him when he realizes the assassins from Sweden have found him.

This movie is an international spy film along the same veins as James Bond and the Bourne series only that it isn't directed by an action director, it is directed by an ambiguous, arthouse type of director. This movie is 2 hours long and it is completely and utterly boring.

In this film, we have 5 pages of dialogue stretched across 2 hours of screen time. Everything else that happens between that is George Clooney building a gun, George Clooney drinking coffee, George Clooney walking, George Clooney jogging, George Clooney running, George Clooney sitting, George Clooney starring off into space and George Clooney looking sad. The American's paper thin plot gets lost in this whirl of boring nothingness.

And that wouldn't bother me so much if this was a character study. It wasn't. This film is boring, long and has a whole lot of talk but it is still not what you would call an acting movie. George Clooney isn't acting in this. He is on auto-pilot, he's just saying the lines with emotion not character. Why? Because he had no character to work with. At the end of the film, we know nothing about Jack, we aren't even interested in him. He's kinda boring. All he does is sit around, looking sad, and building a gun. We learn nothing about him, we aren't given anything to connect with him, I was just sitting there looking at the watch throughout the film.

He is kinda like James Bond who is suffering from depression and is taking a shot load of painkillers. He barely talks in this movie. And while I appreciate this silent intense side of Clooney, I'd rather see his witty, charming persona like in Up In The Air. Just watching this movie and watching him really really depresses you.

The one thing this movie does have going for it is Violente Placido who plays Clooney's love interest. She is one hella fine piece of hot but she took her one dimensional role and made it the brightest parts of this dull, depressing movie. I don't know how she stayed so sunny with George Clooney acting all depressed around her all the time.

Ultimately, you really need to avoid this movie. The ending is predictable, the writing is so-so and the acting is emotionless. The American was just one long, boring, lifeless film that was really really really painful to watch. And this is coming from a guy who sat through Gone With The Wind without so much as a yawn.

RATING: 3/10