The American

Review by Anthony Morris

The latest in a long tradition of stripped-back thrillers, The American is a film which largely revolves around a whole lot of not much. 

Jack (George Clooney) is living with his girlfriend in a shack in Sweden when a couple of hitmen turn up. 

Jack kills them, then kills his girlfriend - maybe she set him up, maybe she's a witness, neither Jack nor the film explains - and heads off to Italy, where his handler sets him up in a small village. 

Actually, Jack doesn't like the first village so he moves to another one, which raises the question of whether trying to hide out in a small town where everyone knows each other is really a good idea. 

But The American isn't a film for people distracted by such questions, as we learn when Jack is given a job by an impossibly sexy assassin: make a sniper rifle that's fast and light and easily concealed. 

Some might think that, with a large chunk of the global economy extremely interested in making such guns, she couldn't simply buy one off the shelf (or why he couldn't get a job at a gun company - he wouldn't be so worried about hitmen then).

Again, to ask such questions is to miss the point : The American is a film about a hard man coming up against the limits of his hardness, and on that level it gets pretty much everything right. 

For a film where not a lot happens this contains a number of extremely tense scenes - Jack is often handing guns over to people we don't quite trust - and when action does break out it's both economical and thrilling. 

There's also a simple satisfaction that comes with watching someone building something (just look at the ratings for those home renovation shows), making even the long gun-building sequences fascinating. 

As the star of the show, Clooney does an excellent job of hinting at the crumbling depths beneath his solid facade, creating a compelling character out of minimal dialogue and scenes of quiet effort. 

A subplot involving a hooker with a heart of gold is a little clunky and obvious, but it fits with the film's old-fashioned (or if you like, throwback) style. Restrained yet brutally effective, The American gets the job done.

4 out of 5

The American
Australian release: 11th November, 2010
Official Site: The American
Cast: George Clooney, Violante Placido, Thekla Reuten, Paolo Bonacelli
Director: Anton Corbijn