American Assassin

A young man is traumatized when his fiancé is murdered in a terrorist attack while on vacation in the UAE. Flash forward and he has trained himself as an individual weapon on a personal mission to infiltrate and eliminate terrorist cells. He gets picked up by an elite CIA special team with Michael Keaton as the legendary boss of infiltration ops leading and training the team. And the team instantly gets pulled into pursuit of a rogue nuclear weapon that has hit the black market. What is supposed to make this different than all other films of this ilk is the personal story and transformation of our hero from vigilante into patriot. The telling line... "patriotism was created to give people like us a higher purpose". That is, patriotism is a valid replacement for God, and in this films opinion, a more worthy recipient. Normalization of vengeance and glamorized preemptive retaliation (yes, unfortunately that is a thing) all in the service of this higher calling of patriotism. The discussion of the characters within the film is not that vengeance is bad. Instead, it is that vengeance alone is not a good enough motive. You must have vengeance plus. So we are trying to make an argument about the limitations of vigilantism and vengeance, but take the too small, too simple step to 'wrap it in patriotism' and it's all OK. The problem is that any true alternative to vigilante justice would require a subversive act of sacrifice and require a 10 film commitment to play the entire story out to a possible better future. The movie going public does not have the patience for that. The best we get in film is a future utopia (a la Star Trek) where we start with a society that has agreed to be largely peaceful and can turn efforts to exploration and improving the universe. But we don't get to see the 9 prequel films for Star Trek... who made the first subversive act of peace... and the second... and the 100th... until it became codified?

But I love that this made me think, albeit probably not in the way the filmmakers intended.
4 stars (out of 5)