American Assassin (2017)
Directed by Michael Cuesta
No — American Assassin is not woke, scoring 12 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
American Assassin arrives with the weary confidence of a franchise pilot that never got its series.
Consciousness Markers
Sanaa Lathan was cast as CIA Deputy Director Irene Kennedy, a character explicitly white in Vince Flynn's novels, with the filmmakers noting she 'shone above' the field; Iranian-Canadian Shiva Negar and Navid Negahban fill Middle Eastern roles, giving the cast a deliberately multiethnic composition.
A woman (Lathan) runs CIA black ops and a female foreign agent (Negar) proves pivotal, but both function within a conventional male-driven revenge-thriller framework with no articulated feminist argument.
The script gestures at a moral about revenge poisoning the soul, but critics noted the film undercuts its own message with gleeful kill scenes, leaving only faint, muddled sermonizing.
The film engages Middle Eastern and Iranian geopolitics and casts accordingly, but frames its Muslim characters primarily through the post-9/11 terrorist-thriller lens rather than any progressive racial consciousness.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the film.
No environmental or climate themes are present.
No critique of capitalism, wealth, or class appears; the film is a state-security procedural.
No body-positivity themes; the cast is uniformly athletic and conventionally fit.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are depicted.
The film is a fictional espionage thriller, not a reworking of historical events.
Why it received this score
American Assassin arrives with the weary confidence of a franchise pilot that never got its series. Dylan O'Brien trains, broods, and kills his way across Libya, Turkey, Poland, and Rome, hunting the men who murdered his fiancee on an Ibiza beach. Michael Keaton, as the obligatory Cold War handler, appears to be having the only good time available. The plot involves stolen plutonium, Iranian hardliners, and a rogue operative called Ghost, all arranged in the orderly fashion of a screenplay assembled from spare parts. Critics found it cliched. They were correct, though the cliches are executed with a certain grim competence.
The casting offers the film's most interesting wrinkle. Sanaa Lathan plays CIA Deputy Director Irene Kennedy, a character white on the page, and the production has said she outshone the field. Shiva Negar and Navid Negahban fill the Middle Eastern roles, giving the ensemble a deliberately mixed composition. None of this is announced or argued. It simply is. The Muslim characters, meanwhile, are sorted into the familiar post-9/11 categories of terrorist and helpful asset, which is geography as much as ideology.
Where the film reaches for a moral, it fumbles. The script keeps insisting that vengeance corrodes the avenger, then stages the killings with undisguised relish. Matt Zoller Seitz noted the contradiction, and it is hard to miss. The residue is a faint sermon delivered between firefights, undercut by the very scenes it follows. The result is a serviceable thriller with a conscience it cannot be bothered to keep.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Part of
Synopsis
Following the murder of his fiancée, Mitch Rapp trains under the instruction of Cold War veteran Stan Hurley. The pair then is enlisted to investigate a wave of apparently random attacks on military and civilian targets.
Questions about American Assassin
Is American Assassin woke?
No — American Assassin is not woke, scoring 12 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does American Assassin have any woke elements?
1 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Representation Casting (45). On Representation Casting: Sanaa Lathan was cast as CIA Deputy Director Irene Kennedy, a character explicitly white in Vince Flynn's novels, with the filmmakers noting she 'shone above' the field; Iranian-Canadian Shiva Negar and Navid Negahban fill Middle Eastern roles, giving the cast a deliberately multiethnic composition.
How does American Assassin compare to other 2017 movies?
It ranks #138 of the 309 films from 2017 we've scored; their average is 19. The wokest is I Am Not Your Negro (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.