He's very tough but who really cares?

Mitch Rapp, the hero of American Assassin, battles bad guys and a muddled script.

Loads of people are familiar with author Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp, a disaffected loner recruited into the CIA after a terrorist murders his girlfriend on a beach right after the two have become engaged. It may take every fan of Flynn’s 16-book series to turn American Assassin — the first Mitch Rapp movie — into a hit.

Muddled by a scattered screenplay and hampered by Dylan O’Brien’s notably unremarkable performance as Rapp, American Assassin does a fair share of globe hopping but manages to go nowhere.

After his fiancee’s death, Rapp trains himself to become a killing machine, staging a one-man Libyan mission to kill the leader of the terrorist group responsible for his fiancee's death. When American troops disrupt his work, Rapp finds himself in the hands of the CIA, where the head of counter-intelligence (Sanaa Lathan) turns him over to Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton), a former Navy SEAL who trains his charges to be merciless killers.

At first, it seems as if swarthy complexions constitute the movie's only requirement for villainy, but we soon learn that a disaffected American (Taylor Kitsch) is trying to arrange a plutonium deal in Poland. Kitsch's character plans to sell Russian plutonium to Iranians — or some such.

That’s only the beginning of global hopscotching that takes Rapp to Turkey, Italy and other places, moving too quickly even to offer travelogue diversions.

In my view, only three reasons justify seeing American Assassin: a reasonably imaginative virtual reality training sequence, Keaton's crazed handling of a wince-inducing scene in which Stan is tortured and a late-picture explosion that can’t be described without giving away the movie’s climax.

Most of the time, American Assassin -- which was directed by Michael Cuesta (Kill the Messenger) -- fails to distinguish itself, looking like a low-rent version of the Jason Bourne movies with a little Jack Ryan thrown in.

For all its fights and action, American Assassin fails to generate the excitement we associate with the discovery of a new hero. The movie pauses for occasional chunks of listless exposition before leaping ahead to the next scene or country.

The net effect: Watching American Assassin made me feel as I if were skimming a second-rate novel, leafing from one chapter to the next, vainly hoping to stumble on something good.

A little town that needs saving

It's difficult to imagine that the makers of The Grand Seduction -- a comedy set in the tiny Newfoundland town of Tickle Cove -- could have created a more predictable movie if they tried. With the fishing industry dead, Tickle Cove finds itself badly in need of an economic boost. Bearish Murray French (Brendan Gleeson) decides he'll try to succeed where others have failed: He takes on the job of bringing a petrochemical recycling plant to Tickle Cove, a development that could restore the town's viability. To seal the deal, Tickle Cove needs a full-time doctor. Through a totally improbable plot twist involving cocaine, a young plastic surgeon (Taylor Kitsch) is coerced into spending a month among the supposedly colorful locals. For its part, the town creates a faux welcoming environment to persuade the poor doctor to sign on as a full-time resident. The townsfolk love hockey: Kitsch's character is a cricket enthusiast. Obligingly, the men of the town feign an interest in cricket, even forming a team. Everyone caters to the young doctor. Gleeson seems a whale among minnows. Kitsch supplies good looks, charm and amiability. There's enough humor here to give The Grand Seduction crowd-pleasing appeal, but this remake of the Quebec-based comedy Seducing Dr. Lewis (2003) makes the colorful and peculiar seem entirely formulaic.

The intense reality of combat

Courage amid chaos in Lone Survivor.

For the most part, the war in Afghanistan has taken place beyond the view of news cameras. In near-Orwellian fashion, most Americans have been insulated from the painful realities of sustained combat. Because of that, it's difficult not to admire the intense authenticity of director Peter Berg's Lone Survivor, a movie about four Navy SEALs sent on a 2005 mission to kill a Taliban leader.

Lone Survivor follows the rigorously trained and highly motivated SEALs from their base camp to a remote area in the mountains. Everything seems under control until an unexpected obstacle compromises the mission: An accidental encounter with a trio of goat herders threatens to expose the SEALs' position.

The SEALs then confront an ethical issue. Should they protect themselves and the mission by killing their captives? Should they tie the herders up, possibly leaving them to succumb to the rigors of the wild? Or should they let them go and abort the mission?

The rules of engagement seem to argue for the latter position, but ethics and extreme pressure don't always mesh, and every possible decision harbors potentially disastrous consequences.

Beyond that, the SEALs are fully aware that a wrong choice could result in a torrent of unwanted after-the-fact attention from a press that doesn't take kindly to the killing of civilians.

All of this makes for the most interesting part of the movie, but it seems like only a few minutes before the SEALs release the shepherds and begin to evacuate the area -- which seems like the right choice. The downside, of course, is that the SEALs quickly are exposed to small army of Taliban fighters.

The result: a vicious battle for survival that's presented with all the harrowing realism Berg can muster.

In a moment when SEALs are credited with many successes, it's interesting to see a movie about a mission gone terribly wrong. No matter how well-planned a mission is and no matter how good the SEALs are at their jobs, there's always a chance that something unpredictable will happen. In all, 19 men were killed, the bulk of them during an attempted helicopter rescue of the four stranded SEALs.

Lone Survivor isn't easy to watch; it's unsparing in its presentation of the bloodshed of combat and the physical and emotional hardships faced by Americans stationed in a country where a good part of the population hates them.

As played by Mark Wahlberg, Petty Officer Marcus Luttrell gradually emerges as the central figure in a band-of-brothers exercise that acknowledges and respects the warrior code that has been imbued in men whose bravery is beyond question.

The men taking part in this mission include Marcus, Matt Axelson (Ben Foster), Danny Dietz (Emile Hirsch) and Mike Murphy (Taylor Kitsch). There's a hierarchy here, but the SEALs work mostly as a team, and Berg makes it clear that the main motivation for the men involves their loyalty to one another.

Berg understands how to maximize cinematic impact. An example: He films the death of team leader Murphy in agonizing slow motion, a self-consciously cinematic touch but one that works to expand the moment to the point at which it's almost unbearable.

In the heat and confusion of combat, other emotional moments can be found. It's impossible not to be moved when a severely wounded Axelson tells Luttrell he wants his wife to know that he loved her, that he died with his brothers and that his heart was full.

In casual, almost off-handed ways, Berg lets us know that these men have lives away from the alien world of Afghanistan's battlefields -- wives, girlfriends and children. It's almost as if their jobs take them into an alternate universe.

The movie's title makes it clear from the start that three of the men aren't going to make it, and we also know that the lone survivor of the title will be Luttrell, who -- along with Patrick Robinson -- wrote the book on which the screenplay (also by Berg) is based.

After a ferocious combat section, the movie slows a bit as Luttrell tries to survive on his own, receiving assistance from friendly villagers, one of whom keeps him from being executed in a scene that's as traumatic as anything else in the film.

Viewed strictly in movie terms, Lone Survivor brims with relentless action and nerve-wracking tension. Berg, who has directed movies such as Battleship (awful) and Friday Night Lights (better), knows how rub our noses in the dirt of war, giving us as little time to reflect as the SEALs themselves have.

It's not the job of the SEALs, who sign up for particularly hazardous duty, to decide whether their sacrifices are absolutely necessary, certainly not during the brutalizing heat of battle. Lone Survivor leaves it to us to struggle with that question. We should.

Oliver Stone gets his groove back

Savages takes a blistering look at the drug trade.

If you didn't already know that it's a bad idea to get crosswise with a Mexican drug lord, Oliver Stone's Savages will deliver the message in bold, gut-kicking fashion. Author Don Winslow's 2010 novel of the same name has provided Stone with a cornucopia of ingredients that he definitely knows how to cook.

Spilling over with sex, violence and ill-gotten luxury, Savages is Stone's best work in a long time, a movie that tells a vivid story that pretty much keeps Stone off his soapbox.

The action revolves around three characters. Chon (Taylor Kitsch) is a former Navy SEAL who runs a thriving marijuana business along with his parter Ben (Aaron Johnson), a brainy Berkeley grad with a social conscience. Ben uses some of his money to help folks in Third World countries.

Chon and Ben live with Ophelia (Blake Lively), a woman who goes by the name of "O" and who narrates this seductive story of crime and corruption. Both men sleep with "O," and both profess to love her. She insists she loves both of them. It takes two guys to make a whole man for "O" -- or so she says.

Stone wisely surrounds the movie's young leads with a veteran supporting cast that includes Salma Hayek (as a drug czarina); John Travolta (as a corrupt DEA agent); Benicio Del Toro (as a brutal mob enforcer) and Demian Bichir (as a well-dressed executive in Hayek's crime network).

The trouble starts when Hayek's Elena decides that she's going to take over Chon and Ben's business. She's attracted to this California duo because they've cultivated the best pot in the U.S., marijuana known for its killer THC count.

Ben, who's had enough of the drug business, is ready to sell. Chon wants to hold onto the enterprise they've built. Besides, he's convinced that no involvement with Mexican drug lords comes with insurance: It only can end badly.

If there's a certain amount of callowness among the movie's younger actors, the old pros compensate. Looking thick as a side of beef and sporting a close-cropped hair cut, Travolta is both funny and appalling as a rogue DEA agent; Del Toro's turn as the quietly vicious Lado follows suit; it's, by turns, chilling and amusing; and Hayek brings power-hungry bitchiness to new levels of steely-eyed intensity as Elena.

The rest of the plot involves kidnappings, torture and a level of brutality from which Stone never shrinks. Think of it this way: When drug lords decide to "punish" someone, they're not talking about spankings or slaps on the wrist. The squeamish should know that the movie includes beheadings and a scene in which a suspected rat is doused with gasoline and burned alive.

I don't know if there's a larger point here, although we can't help noticing that the drug trade couldn't thrive without massive police corruption and wanton violence.

Stone and cinematographer Dan Mindel balance the bloodshed with the rich light of Laguna Beach, where Chon, Ben and "O" reside. They also do a fine job of pointing out how luxury contrasts with squalor, depending on where characters fit on the drug-trade ladder.

Some of the dialogue is burdened by a phony, pulp toughness that rings hollow ("You don't charge the world, it changes you") and some of it is bitingly funny. I can't cite the movie's best darkly funny example without including a spoiler, so you'll have to take my word about the amusing part.

You'll find many of Stone's trademark visual tricks, but this time, he's letting the story do most of the work, and Savages is better off for it. Put another way: The movie is good enough to make you forget all about Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Even an overly tricky finale (bound to annoy some viewers) can't cancel the pleasures of this robust, sensual and unashamedly scabrous movie.

The real fun of Savages springs from the movie's pungency, from Stone's bravura handling of its violent set pieces and from his insistent acknowledgement that the dark side doesn't necessarily disappear just because the California sun is shining.

Missteps sink this 'Battleship'

It looks like a video game. Too bad you have to watch it instead of playing.

Terrible dialogue, ear-splitting noise, an uninspired premise, patriotic pandering, booming close-ups and an ocean full of cornball sentiment help sink the action movie Battleship not long after it leaves port. Derived from a Hasbro board game, Battleship is one of those lamentable movies that seem to have been assembled from spare parts taken from other movies. You'll find the cacophonous metal-on-metal abrasions of the Transformer movies, the fist-pumping bravado of movies such as Top Gun and a sic-fi premise that could have been lifted from any number of aggressively commercial entertainments from director Michael Bay. You know the drill: An alien force is about to invade the Earth. It falls to a slacker hero (Taylor Kitsch) to save humanity by finding his emerging manhood and leading the charge against the aliens. A large cast features several highlighted performances: Alexander Skarsgard of True Blood fame == plays Kitsch's older brother, and Brooklyn Decker portrays Kitsch's love interest. She's the daughter of an admiral (a little seen Liam Neeson). Director Peter Berg piles on the heavy action, much of it built around chaotic camera movements and frenzied editing. The aliens, once revealed, are disappointing creatures. Maybe it doesn't matter because most of the time, we can't' see them anyway: They're hidden by armored suits that make them look as if they were conceived as action figures long before there were jammed into this orgy of destruction. Berg takes a bow toward The Greatest Generation in an effort to blend contemporary war heroes with those from our more glorious World War II past, but the whole business comes off as rigid salute to the kind of courage found only in movies, bolstered, of course, by a megaton barrage of CGI. Did I say the movie is loud? Think of it this way: Experiencing Battleship is like listening to a symphony composed entirely of cymbal crashes.

'John Carter' aims at Mars, but misses

John Carter may not be a dud, but it's not the one we've all been waiting for, either.

Disney seems to shopping for a new franchise with John Carter, an action adventure taken from A Princess of Mars, the first in a series of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels centered on John Carter, a Civil War veteran who is transported to Mars. Originally published in 1912, Burroughs' novel has been the basis for a variety of comic book series that achieved popularity among some boomers. Maybe that's why Disney put its money on a piece of sci-fi that originated long before the words “high tech” entered the popular vocabulary.

If I were a betting man, I’d wager against the development of a major John Carter franchise, at least if the first movie is any indication. John Carter isn’t awful. It is, however, determinedly retro, and if you didn’t know it derived from Burroughs, you might find it to be a bit retro, a bit cheesy and mostly lacking in the kind of golly-gee enthusiasm that sometimes saves movies from looking ... well ... cheesy and dated. Worse yet, as played by Taylor Kitsch, the main character comes off as bare-chested and bland.

Director Andrew Stanton (WALL-E and Finding Nemo) doesn’t seem to have had as much luck making the leap to live action as Brad Bird, who went from The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille to the breathless achievements of Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol.

At two-hours and 12 minutes, John Carter has a few fun moments, but it also can feel as if it's laboring under its own weight, and several of the most interesting supporting players -- Willem Dafoe, Samantha Morton, and Thomas Haden Church - are unseen, providing voices for CGI characters such as Sola, a.k.a, the green martian woman from Thark.

The story transports John Carter to Mars (never mind how) where he finds himself battling with the Tharks, reptilian-looking creatures with tusks, long faces, four arms and a language that requires subtitles.

Tharks alone are not sufficient fodder for a movie this sprawling, so the plot tosses Carter into the middle of a battle between warring cities of red-skinned Martians, who look like humans who've spent too much time at the beach. Goaded by Princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins) of Helium, Carter ultimately drops his neutrality and joins the battle to keep Helium from being dominated by the wicked Prince Sab Than (Dominic West). There's even more plot manipulation thanks to another group of evildoers called The Elites.

To add another level of complication, Sab wants to marry Princess Dejah Thoris. Her father (Ciaran Hinds) consents to the wedding to keep Helium from being destroyed.

Of course, Carter and Dejah Thoris are the movie’s real romantic item, and by the end, Stanton manages a small tug at our oft-plucked heart strings.

I could have done without the 3-D, which seemed to be used to no special advantage, and John Carter includes a fair amount of Martian gibberish that would have been unbearable had it not generated a few unintended chuckles.

Oh, I almost forgot. On Mars, Carter discovers that he’s able to make giant leaps into the air; this newly acquired power, a result of diminished gravitational pull, helps him to survive and to become an effective fighter, including in the obligatory scene in which he battles giant creatures in an arena.

The movie, however, hardly represents a giant leap when it comes to action/adventure: I can't say John Carter generated the excitement a burgeoning franchise needs, and it certainly didn’t make me crave another helping.