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Arts, Entertainment & Arizona... Since 1998
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Harvey Critic
It's chic for a movie critic to say that "the book is better," but in this case-considering that the story is a slow-moving psychological suspense thriller-Martin Booth's 1990 novel is the way to go. As you turn the pages you will doubtless wonder what comes next, the type of tale that intrigues on the page but comes across inert on the big screen. As directed by Anton Corbijn, "The American" is spare of dialogue (script by Rowan Joffe and the novelist), the music by Herbert Grönemeyer either non-existent or anything but intrusive, with a landscape in Italy's Abruzzo region that's, what should we say, European? The medieval town built on a hill, scene of most of the action, would be nice to drive through but would hardly entice tourists to stay overnight. This is the sort of place, however, that a fellow in the service of assassins might want to live, a form of redemption that he would not likely find in his home country but rather as an expatriate living the quiet life away from what novelist Martin Booth calls "the shadow-dwellers."
"There are three kinds of women," says Alex Lippi (Romain Duris), a man who'd easily have found a place on Bennett Cerf's long-departed TV show "What's My Line?" "There are women who are happy; there are women who are unhappy; and there are women who are unhappy but don't know it." Alex would go primarily after that last group, in effect acting as a would-be psychoanalyst who would step in and play Don Juan to get the unhappy women to fall in love with him and thereby dump the men who are making them miserable. This is the high concept that fuels Pascal Chaumeil's "Heartbreaker," a jet-paced French romantic comedy, the kind that Americans and British are incapable of making (think of bores like Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant, for example).
Susan Granger Reviews
Jimmy Buffett wrote a song called "Overkill" and that's the word which best describes this high-powered yet formulaic heist movie that's punctuated with shootouts and explosions, particularly a stylized machine-gun gangbang with Russian mobsters that decimates a Los Angeles hotel suite.
Now I have to read Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling memoir - because this tepid travelogue of a self-involved yuppie writer can't be what's inspired so many women.
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