American Star
Directed by Gonzalo López-Gallego
Written by Nacho Faerna
Starring Ian McShane, Nora Arnezeder, and Adam Nagaitis
Rated R
Runtime: 107 minutes
In theaters January 26

by Clayton Hayes, Staff Writer

You’d be forgiven for sitting down to watch American Star with the expectation that it will be a tense action thriller. Promo materials for Gonzalo López-Gallego’s film make sure to tout the link between Ian McShane’s “lethal assassin on his final assignment” and his past roles in the John Wick films and Deadwood TV series. The trailer is full of assassin-thriller cliches: photos in manilla envelopes, an attractive but lonely blonde woman with a French accent, paranoid glances in rear-view mirrors, and cars skidding off of roads, a man shouting at another man about getting too involved.

After having seen it, however, you may instead be wondering just how much of American Star’s funding came from car manufacturers. Audiences are treated to shot after shot of SUVs gliding along the dusty roads of Fuerteventura, their polished black paint reflecting the equatorial sun. The island’s admittedly dramatic landscape makes for some breathtaking views, but the novelty wears off after the first half-hour or so. Unfortunately, that’ll be after you grow weary of seeing Ian McShane walk through the frame and stare off into the middle distance. I get it, the man’s got a face with some topography! It makes for a perfect counterpoint to the North African hills and valleys of the Canary Islands, but there’s only so long anyone can spend staring at even a face as interesting as his.

Sadly, American Star doesn’t give McShane much to do other than be seen. His performance is broadly a nonverbal one, and the film has long stretches where only one or two lines are spoken. This is perhaps down to Spanish screenwriter Nacho Faerna: Star is his first feature-length writing credit in the English language.

Not that a lack of dialogue or thriller setpieces automatically disqualifies American Star from being worth a watch. I don’t have a problem with the quietness of the film (I even think it’s a reasonable interpretation of the trailer), but what I do have a problem with is its inability to decide what kind of movie it’s trying to be. It’s almost as though Star is made up of two distinct films that have been stitched together with car commercial b-roll.

Film number one sees Wilson the assassin (McShane) checks into a touristy hotel on Fuerteventura for a sort of impromptu holiday. We follow him as he bonds with the wayward child whose family is staying just down the hall, with the freewheeling young woman who bartends at a nearby dive, and even with the film’s titular ship the American Star, which ran aground off the island’s west coast in 1994. He’s an old man struggling to break free from a life that is lonely and devoid of any pleasure, but fate, as it always does in stories like these, has other plans.

The second film revolves around a hiccup in the job that brought Wilson to Fuerteventura. This leads to a surprise visit from Ryan, a colleague and sort-of family friend of Wilson’s, played by a woefully miscast Adam Nagaitis. The relationship between Wilson and Ryan, meant to be the key source of tension in the film, is poorly-sketched to the point of distraction. Wilson is obviously the older of the two and served with Ryan’s father in the Falklands War: Ryan even goes so far as to call Wilson his “uncle.” But in order for his presence to cause the tension Star requires, Ryan needs to be a figure of authority. He lectures Wilson on “rule number one” of being an assassin as though he’s the more senior of the two, and at times, he acts like Wilson’s handler. At other times both characters refer to some mysterious authority that seems to handle decision making and communicating with each independently (or maybe just with Ryan).

In short, it’s a mess, and this total lack of clarity sucks all of the tension out of American Star. Not that Wilson’s interactions with other characters were helping much, either. The relationship at the film’s core, portrayed by McShane and Nora Arnezeder, is well-acted and enjoyable to watch but (perhaps mercifully) devoid of anything like sexual tension. The screentime McShane shares with child actor Oscar Coleman are, for the most part, light and fun, though a bizarre final scene between the two is the film’s only truly tense moment (not, I think, intentionally so).

It’s too bad. The more thriller-esque storyline feels tacked-on to the extent that I wonder if it was a marketing ploy to capitalize on McShane’s John Wick connection. The much more interesting (and much more successful) part of the film, the character study, is completely overshadowed by the shoehorned-in action sequences.