Review of The American (2010) by Kratos649 — 12 Nov 2022
This movie has just popped up on Netflix so I thought I'd throw in my two cents worth. Wow this movie is bad. Look, I like Clooney as an actor but this movie is so bad that I don't know how it got made.
The first half hour is full of plot holes: Spoiler alert! In the first 5 minutes George and his girlfriend are enjoying a stroll through the icy wastes of northern Sweden when they inexplicably get attacked by a sniper, but not in the way you'd expect (with the sniper 300 metres away, lying down in the snow in full camouflage waiting for ol Georgie to wander into the telescopic sight of the rifle), no.
The sniper waits until George and his girlfriend have discovered his footsteps in the snow and are really close. The sniper is standing upright and George easily dispatches the sniper with a pistol then shoots his own girlfriend in the back of the head.
(This murder is never explained in the entire movie except when George tells his contact in Rome that she had nothing to do with the sniper attack, which begs the question, why did he murder her,? But anyway, back to northern Sweden).
Another man gets out of a car nearby (presumably the sniper's accomplice) and is inexplicably wearing snow camouflage pants but a dark blue jacket that stands out like crazy in the snowy environment. George dispatches him before we can learn anything about him, presumably for crimes against fashion.
As I said this all happens in the first 5 minutes and it doesn't improve much after that. At one point George steals some car parts from a mechanic and somehow makes a gun from them in his hotel room with no access to machine tools of any kind.
This movie is an action movie with pretensions to be an art film and it succeeds in neither category. It gets 1 point for some nice scenery but otherwise don't bother.
This review of The American (2010) was written by Kratos649 on 12 Nov 2022.
The American has generally received mixed reviews.
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