Over the past few years or so, the world has been graced with the glorious comeback of one of my favorite actors of all time, Michael Keaton. After becoming a big star in the 80’s and early 90’s with movies like “Beetlejuice” and “Batman” he faded into obscurity in the 2000’s, leaving many people to forget how talented of an actor he is. But since 2014, Keaton has made come back to the main stream conscious with glorious fashion. He led the ensemble drama of “Spotlight” that went on to win best picture the year it came out. He starred in “The Founder”, which is somewhat of a flat movie in of itself but is elevated by his performance. He was the villain in “Spiderman: Homecoming”, and instantly became one of the best villains in the MCU due to his performance alone. And of course, he delivered a performance that as far as I’m concerned should have won him an Oscar with “Birdman (Or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)”, which other than “Inception”, has been my favorite movie of the past decade. And now he partners with up and coming actor Dylan O’Brien to deliver the action thriller “American Assassin”. And sadly, it looks Keaton’s comeback may have hit a bump in the road, because “American Assassin” is tonally uneven and bland film that puts a blemish on Keaton’s perfect comeback record.

“American Assassin” follows Mitch Rapp, played by Dylan O’Brien, who watches his girlfriend get murdered by terrioists in Spain after he proposes to her. Enraged, he asks for the help of Stan Hurley, played by Michael Keaton, an ex navy seal to train him to become an assassin. And within eighteen months, he becomes a killing machine who is ready to stop Hurly’s former student Ghost, played by Taylor Kitsch, from blowing up a naval fleet with plutonium. Now with that plot, you might expect this movie to be a dumb fun action movie like “Point Break” and “Under Siege”. But here in lies the films biggest issue, and that is that it has a lot of cool story ideas, but executes them in such a flat way that you come off feeling monumentally bored. This movie makes you feel as if its going to go to an interesting place by showing Mitch train out in the woods to become a professional killer. But eventually, the movie just devolves into a cookie cutter story of terrorist is trying to blow something up and the government has to stop him. You get can pretty much expect every plot point in this movie to occur before it does. Such as the newcomer getting chastised for taking the mission into his own hands, one of the team members in the assassination squad is a double agent, the main villain being a student of the leader, and one of the most tacked on romances I have seen in a movie with Mitch and his partner Annika, played Shiva Negar. Look at the villain of the film Ghost. We set up that he Hurly taught him all of his skills and that he plans to attack a naval fleet, but in the end, we that he’s making this attack just because. The idea of being given the pieces to an interesting story and then doing nothing with it run rampant in this film because aside from the first fifteen minutes, which is actually pretty good and had me interested in where the story was going, the film does nothing you haven’t seen before in previous better movies. The only two real bright spots in this film are Dylan O’Brien and Michael Keaton as our two leads. Despite making his name in YA adaptations, I feel like O’Brien has a lot of untapped potential as an actor, and he taps into this undermined talent in this film. He’s able to sell the emotion of angry really well and he does pull off his own martial arts stunts in a believable way. And of course, Michael Keaton is just as excellent in this film as he is in any other. He is over the top in this role, but not in a way where it becomes distracting. The only parts in this film where you won’t be falling asleep is when Keaton is on screen. The talent of these two can’t save this film however, because it is plagued with a boring and lifeless script, which there is sadly no cure for.

So by now, you have probably guessed that the biggest issue with this film is its lifelessness. And in a way, you’d be right. My biggest complaint about this film is that is extremely boring and offers nothing interesting to its audience. However, if that was my only issue with the film, while it wouldn’t be good, I really couldn’t find myself calling the film anything less than mediocre. The reason why this movie is such failure is not just because it has uninteresting material, but because it’s contrasted with its sporadic and lopsided direction. While the beginning scene of this film is well directed and very emotional, every other scene in this movie feels as if the director knew how boring the script and thought he had to liven the film up. Every action scene in this movie has an extreme over use of shaky cam. When ever the tension in a scene is raised, you can almost always expect the camera to start swaying left to right to add what the movie thinks is another layer of drama. This does not leave the viewer on the edge of their seats like the film makers think, but instead leaves the viewer confused by what exactly is going in a scene and where everything is placed. The shaky cam isn’t just used in action scenes. Sometimes it’s included in a scene of two characters talking to each other for absolutely no reason. These scenes of dialogue also usually feature this films stock soundtrack that sounds as if it was scored in fifteen minutes. The directing is so sloppy compared to the shallow script that by the third act of the movie where everything proceeds to hit the fan, you cease to understand anything that is going and why the characters are doing the actions they end up doing. This movie has a run time of one hour and fifty minutes, which is a run time I don’t think anyone would call too short or too long. But trust, as you watch this movie, it will feel too long because this movie feels like it goes on twice as long as it does. To be fair to the movie, it never does trick you into thinking its going to end and then continue running. I was fairly certain where we were in the movie plot wise throughout. But this movie throws out so much exposition and needless facts at you that you begin to be overwhelmed very quickly into the film. The only issue is that nothing this movie tries to throw at you is interesting, so if you don’t understand what’s going on, you’re not missing much. Also, while I’m usually not one to be bothered by these sorts of things, this movie has one of the most unnecessary nude scenes I have ever seen in a movie. A character is talking on the phone and then suddenly, a women is naked in the foreground. Maybe if this movie was more interesting and directed better it wouldn’t have bothered me.

I’m not one to call it quits when a streak of something good is ruined by something bad coming out. If “Thor: Ragnarok” ends being bad, I won’t just suddenly lose my trust in the MCU, mainly because they have delivered great film after great film in a row now for almost ten years. Just because this movie is pretty doesn’t mean I think that Michael Keaton’s comeback tour is over, he just took a wrong turn with this movie. But to be fair, this film is a pretty wrong wrong turn because it was clear that the writer of this film and director Michael Cuesta had no idea how to make this film interesting. In the end, “American Assassin” is a boring film that despite having potential, squanders almost all of it by being tonally uneven and incredibly uninteresting. If you have an afternoon where you literally have nothing to do and you find this movie on TV, maybe watch it for twenty minutes before you get bored. But other than that, you shouldn’t watch this movie, and I would not recommend you see it in theatres. This is one movie that definitely went rogue and failed to complete its assignment.