From the Rental Vault: American Assassin (2017)

The war on terror has no battlefronts, no divisions, no maps or territorial objectives. Its initiators make a point of attacking non-military sites and slaughtering non-combatants, and those who would defend against them can't limit themselves to the old traditional understanding of war. They will need ruthlessness, cunning and the ability to strike from the shadows just as surely as do their foes, breaking the laws of war as surely as they break the laws of nations.

CIA Deputy Director Irene Kennedy thinks she's found a new soldier for her fight in Mitch Rapp, a young man who lost his girlfriend in a terror attack and later managed to infiltrate the very terror cell that planned it. Raw, unskilled and undisciplined, Rapp will be trained by veteran operative Stan Hurley in order to join him in a hunt for sinister forces who've acquired plutonium, a nuclear trigger and the expertise to build a working atomic bomb. Though at first they think they're tracking Iranians they find that a rogue American operative, one who has history with Hurley, is deeply involved and deadlier than anyone else on the board. Except, perhaps, for Mitch Rapp, the titular American Assassin.

Assassin is based on Vince Flynn's 2010 book of the same name. It's the origin of his CIA uber-agent, Mitch Rapp, even though it's written well into the series. Flynn wrote it as a flashback, setting it in the early 1990s, but moviemakers decided to bring it into the modern day. Teen Wolf and Maze Runner star Dylan O'Brien takes on the role of the driven Rapp, with Michael Keaton as Hurley and Sanaa Lathan as Irene Kennedy. Taylor Kitsch is the rogue operative Ghost.

The underlying mood of every Rapp book Flynn wrote was barely (and not always) contained rage. Rapp worked with a love of country and a deep desire to make every terrorist everywhere pay for the loss of his girlfriend in the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing. Rapp seethes pretty much from title page to endpaper, only marginally less at the people on his side who he believes stand in the way of What Needs to Be Done. By contrast, the movie version of American Assassin is curiously bloodless -- perhaps because O'Brien's wooden instead of cold-blooded performance doesn't communicate much of anything at all, let alone rage. He's not helped much by the script, which alternates between telling us how out-of-control Rapp is and having him constantly be dressed down by Hurley about putting the mission first and deceased colleagues out of mind.

Assassin really only breathes when Keaton is onscreen; he seems like the only cast member who figured he should work for the paycheck the studio cut him. Granted, the script is nothing special. The closest I've ever come to real espionage is the regular consumption of airport spy thrillers but even I can spot the holes in the intelligence tradecraft shown in this movie. But Keaton takes what he's given and works harder with it than it deserves in order to make Stan Hurley the most interesting person on the screen; it's not only his picture on the poster that's outsized compared to the rest of the cast.

American Assassin was conceived as the potential first in a series of movies based on the Rapp books, now being written by Kyle Mills following Flynn's 2013 passing. Its box office was respectable but about as uninspiring as the movie itself and no plans to follow it up have ever been seriously discussed.