IAN MCSHANE IN AMERICAN STAR

GONZALO LÓPEZ-GALLEGO: AMERICAN STAR (2024)- MOSTLY BRITISH SERIES

A low-keyed, scenic hit man story

Matt Zoller Seitz indicates in his RogerEbert.com review that he likes American Star. He finds Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands where the action tkes place to be not just an easy scenic background but "gobsmackingly gorgeous," and he sees a magical rapport between director López-Gallego and his 81-year-old but wonderfully preserved star Ian McShane, who plays an aging hit man called Wilson settling in to do a last job. He thinks McShane, whose character talks little, has a gift for making thoughts and feelings clearly readable in his face. This enthusiastic view provides an attractive angle on the film but perhaps a minority one.

I found McShane's face rather impassive, though that's not necessarily a bad thing. He and his role here is compared by Seitz to Alain Delon or Clint Eastwood, both of whose acting skills have been questioned by those insensitive to the value of a stoney face in film noir. These men are mysterious mimes. That's what they do. It's fine. There just has to be something good happening around them.

American Star is the name of a wrecked vessel that a woman called Gloria (Nora Arnezeder), a bartender who befriends him, takes Wilson to see in an odd cove reachable only by foot. Since Gloria, whose enthusiasm for Wilson seems unconvincing, is apparently also the woman Wilson saw when scoping out the modernist pad of his assigned mark who hasn't shown up yet, you might be forgiven for suspecting she is going to try to bump Wilson off in this remote place.

It's not quite sure how we should take Gloria. Her mother (played by Fanny Ardant, no less) tells Wilson her daughter likes to rescue scrap metal. So obviously Wilson, a traumatized veteran of the Falklands, embodied by the suave McShane, is, metaphorically speaking, Gloria's latest American Star.

Like Delon in parts of Jean-PIerre Melville's LLe Samouraï, Wilson moves around the island as if in a pantomime. He comes to town, rents a car, checks into a luxuy hotel, drinks and enjoys bar entertainment. (His wood-lined hotel room, though nice, is far less memorable than Delon's dingy Le Samouraï pad.) He examines photos of his intended victim and visits his empty villa. His dark suit is impeccable even though not the sporting gear usual on the island.

Wilson meets two others and keeps running into them. One, more just for entertainment and to show us our protagonist's human side, is Max (Oscar Coleman), a boy with big hair and a British accent who is Wilson's neighbor in the hotel, who is ignored by his squabbling parents. Wilson playfully takes Max under his wing, discussing why he doesn't swim and encouraging him to consider a military career as a paratrooper such as he once had. The other guy is a young man called Ryan (Adam Nagaitis of Yann Demanges' 71), the tall, bold son of a military comrade of Wilson's, who is hateable and yet sort of likeable. Apparently he too is a hitman.

Maybe this screenplay is interesting and mysterious or maybe it's just sketchy. We don't need to know more about Max. He's just a kid. But just as we don't know what Olivia's intentions are, or whether her character is faking enthusiasm or the actress is just overdoing it, we don't know if Ryan is friend or foe and don't know if he's there to supervise Wilson's kill or kill him when he has carried it out.

Ben Kenigsberg's review for The New York Times says it's more interesting than a mere summary implies, and "the director, Gonzalo López-Gallego, can sustain a solid slow burn. "Still," he warns, "neither McShane nor the scenery can take the rust off the basic scenario." What he means is the theme of a waiting, one-last-time hit man.

That is probably the prevailing view, since the critcs haven't been enthusiastic about Americnan Star. It's worth listening to how Seitz defends his more positive take. He says McShane is "of the sixties (and the seventies)," meaning he sticks mostly to projects with characters "who aren’t coded exclusively as good or bad, and in which the storytelling leaves space for viewers to contemplate or argue about what was meant or intended." That certailnly fits here. But I just didn't feel there was quite enough to American Star. The violence comes all at the end and almost cdould be part of another movie. I'd have liked the inertia to have an ugly underbelly, as I described in Michel Franco's slightly weird Sundown, starring Tim Roth. Josh Kupecki of the Austin Chronicle neatly described Sundown as "O. Henry by way of Michael Haneke." It's got economy, surprise, and a memorably nasty edge. American Star could have used those qualities.

American Star, 107 mins., In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. Viewed for its inclusion in the SF Indiefest Feb/ 2025. Metacritic rating: 66%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.