The American

*** - This slow-moving and ponderous 2010 spy thriller from Dutch director Anton Corbijn is fairly entertaining, but for being a spy/espionage/assassin type of movie it was quite a bit more laid back and tedious than one might expect. George Clooney stars as a guy who is some kind of hit man or weapons trader or something, who is tracked down to Italy by some people who want him dead for no apparent reason, where he is told to lay low by his handler. He immediately befriends a local gossip-y priest, gets some work on his car done by a mechanic, frequents a busy local bar, and visits a prostitute on numerous occasions, thereby blowing any cover he may have hoped to have had. He is unsurprisingly tracked down by the bad guys where a deal goes bad, a few guys end up dead and Clooney may or not be killed, leaving his new hooker girlfriend crying at the edge of a stream. Where this movie fell down for me was in its decision to not let us know what exactly Clooney did, why he did it or who he did it for. Was he an assassin, an arms dealer, a weapon fabricator, or all of the above? Were there actually people called “The Swedes” who were after him? And who exactly was the old guy he kept talking to on the phone? While all these questions may not be answered in their entirety, enough of it was hinted at to keep the story mostly coherent. It was also very nicely photographed and Corbijn’s direction was solid. Plus, the Italian hooker broad was pretty hot.