At last, in American Star, someone has given Ian McShane a lead role in a movie that he can get properly stuck into. Not a fine co-starring role (Sexy Beast) or fine supporting role (John Wick and its sequels) or as a fine co-lead in a spin-off from a TV show (Deadwood) but a bona-fide lead role in a movie that’s all his own.
It’s a good movie too. It dips a bit in the last third but ends so powerfully you’ll forgive it. It opens powerfully too. In a stylised, wordless sequence, we follow McShane’s black-clad Wilson as he lands on the island of Fuerteventura, hires a car and drives out into the brutal, blackly volcanic interior of the island. At one point he stops the car, opens an envelope containing some photographs and checks his gun is in working order.
He’s a hitman, we now know.
But the job doesn’t go according to plan, because the target isn’t at home. Forcing Wilson to postpone the hit. But rather than leave the island on the next plane back to London, he stays on sunny Fuerteventura and books himself into a tourist hotel, having evidently decided that what this hitman needs is a holiday.
Over the next few days Wilson does a lot of things that men trying to stay incognito don’t do. He befriends a lonely kid (Oscar Coleman) in the hotel, also gets to know a young French woman (Nora Arnezeder) who works in a bar, even going so far as to meet her mother (Fanny Ardant).
The hitman, perhaps consciously, perhaps not, is assembling an ad hoc family around himself.
If the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain, in this movie it starts falling on Wilson when Ryan (Adam Nagaitas) turns up. A younger, edgier blow-in, Ryan might be Wilson’s nephew or maybe the son of one of Wilson’s old soldier buddies. He’s superficially affable and deferential enough but Ryan is clearly not on Fuerteventura for the sunshine. He signals the turn of events that will lead to a brutal finale which, if nothing else, reveals that beneath the cool and even attractive exterior a hitman is basically a trained psychopath.
Some of this stuff is familiar – the “last job”, the hitman having existential qualms – especially if you’ve seen that George Clooney movie The American. Like that, this fascinating movie doesn’t spell much out, leaving McShane’s spare acting style and the many close-ups on his craggy face to do a lot of the work.
For instance, are Wilson and Arnezeder’s Gloria going to embark on some sort of romance? Nacho Faerna’s lean script suggests they are; McShane’s face thinks otherwise.
McShane, at 81, is playing about 60-ish, and convincingly getting away with it. He’s a producer on this movie (and so gave himself the role) and has worked together with director Gonzalo López-Gallego once before, on 2016’s Hollow Point.
There’s so much good stuff in this collaboration that it seems mean to point out that all is not great. The American Star of the title is a hulking great wrecked ship beached off the coast of the island and lies there like some massively unnecessary metaphor for the condition of Wilson’s soul, when the blasted interiors of Fuerteventura have delivered that already – and López-Gallego and cameraman José David Montero have made sure we’ve seen plenty of those. And some of the scenes between Gloria and Wilson are a touch head-scratching, like when they’re listening to a song by Julio Iglesias about “a man who doesn’t know who he is any more” and, blow me, another unnecessary metaphor is wheeled into service.
Just hum through these bits, because in the main this is a gloriously dry and existentially bleak movie, and the good bits have a knockout power. That ending. Woof!
American Star – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
