Freeze Frame: “American Assassin,” “13 Minutes”

Filmmakers have been trying for years to adapt the political thrillers by the late author Vince Flynn. His CIA super agent Mitch Rapp finally makes his big screen appearance in “American Assassin,” a noisy thriller that introduces us to Rapp in hopes of creating a new franchise.

Actor Dylan O’Brian, best known for the “Maze Runners” movies, plays Rapp, a young man who seeks revenge on terrorists who gunned down his girlfriend. He becomes a black ops recruit and goes into training with no-nonsense agent Stan Hurley, played by Michael Keaton. The training is cut short when a former CIA agent called “Ghost,” played by Taylor Kitsch, helps some rogue Iranians steal a nuclear weapon.

The movie has plenty of action and manages to rev up the audience with its violent revenge tale, but there are leaps of logic in the script that was written by committee, eroding the story’s credibility and dulling its impact. Still, “American Assassin” is lively enough to please most action fans.

Just when you thought every story about Nazi Germany had been told, along comes “13 Minutes.”  Christian Friedel stars as Georg Elser, a German carpenter who, in November of 1939, created a time bomb all on his own that missed killing Hitler by a mere thirteen minutes. While the movie may not quite achieve the emotional resonance it was working for, it’s a fascinating account of a little-known piece of WWII history.

Also potentially opening this week, “All I See is You” is a Marc Forster drama about a blind woman, played by Blake Lively, who suddenly regains her sight and discovers things that put a strain on her marriage. And “mother!” is a hallucinatory psychological thriller from filmmaker Darren Aronofsky starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem and Michelle Pfeiffer. Lawrence plays a woman whose marriage is disrupted when unwanted strangers arrive on the scene.

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