I was really excited for American Assassin to arrive in theaters. Then I saw the trailer and realized the filmmakers totally ignored the book. Apparently, the notion of making a movie about an assassin exacting revenge on Muslim terrorists would be too bigoted.
Movie is dead on arrival, as far as I'm concerned.
Then don't read Ian Fleming's "The Spy who Loved Me", not even close to the James
Bond movie they made.
Same for "Live and Let Die." I've read all the Fleming novels many times. The thing is, the Bond novels are generally so cartoonish anyway that you don't much care what they do with the movies.
But to shy away from the centrality of Muslim Terrorism in Vince Flynn's books is, in this day and age, clearly political pandering. Instead of Mitch Rapp hunting down Muslim terrorists who kidnapped a businessman and a CIA operative in Beirut, we get some story about Rapp hunting down a rogue CIA operative who's trying to start a global war. In other words, it's yet another narrative about America making its own mess. So it's going to sell real well in France, India, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. And it has a gorgeous Turkish female operative, so the Turks'll dig it. That's what the filmmakers want. Making a movie about killing radical Muslim terrorists is going to cut into international sales.
But that was Vince Flynn's narrative.
