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…was The American – the muted hitman flick which aims for the minimalism of Melville but winds up strangely vacant. The film is photographer-cum-filmmaker Anton Corbijn’s follow-up to the excellent Ian Curtis biopic, Control, which granted motion to the moody compositional stylings of his rock photography work to lasting, mesmeric effect. And yet, despite sharing with that film a fixed visual finesse and superior modulation of tone, The American proves as evanescent as a burst of pink mist. It’s most notable as a sustained exercise in tenor (displacement; quietude) and the cultivation of a sense of place, because the closing credits bring with them the deflating realisation that there’s been little else to latch onto throughout.

George Clooney stars, cast somewhat against type as the doleful professional assassin who answers to two names throughout: first Jack, and then later, Edward. In a striking pre-credits sequence set against the snow-draped wilds of Sweden, we witness the terrible price of keeping company with his coolly efficient killer. When his expertise as a maker of customised firearms sees him relocated to regional Italy for a job, a superior cautions him: “Don’t make any friends.” You see, the life of a career hitman is inevitably a lonely one. This is about as near to a point as The American ever really gets.

Corbijn opts for sustained stretches of silence to demonstrate Jack/Edward’s isolation, letting his lens do the talking for the most. So Clooney disassembles a rifle in a single taciturn take, and enacts his rigorous morning fitness regime just as soundlessly. He slips through the village with minimal contact with the locals, sitting in coffee shops and arranging his professional rendezvous’ with his beautiful client (Thekla Reuten) via phone booths. His only other human contact comes in the form of an absurdly comely prostitute (Violante Placido, who generously maintains a ‘European’ attitude to clothing) and the village priest (Paolo Bonacelli), who predictably serves as the movie’s moral mouthpiece. As he and Jack/Edward form amity over brandy and strolls in the park, he’s reduced to little more than the verbatim and ad nauseum voicing of the film’s rote subtext: that it’s never too late for a wayward soul to seek absolution.

The episodes of stillness are ruptured by fleet flare-ups of incident whenever we might find our sympathies drifting too absent-mindedly toward Jack/Edward. He’s a killer, after all – and a killer by choice. Yet the film is frustratingly ambivalent about this. On the one hand, these punctuations of violence remind us that despite being played by George Clooney, our eponymous tourist is a reprehensible fellow who’ll kill arbitrarily to save his own skin. On the other, the film’s finale, by way of an especially on-the-nose case of visual symbolism, expects us shed tears when tragedy inevitably befalls him. Morally indeterminate characters are the most interesting of all, so there’s no faulting The American for rendering its protagonist in arcane shades of grey. What’s disappointing here is the absence of any real sense of existential exploration. Instead of reflective, the film is merely aloof. It’s a damning distinction.

An interesting counterpoint is The Limits of Control – Jim Jarmusch’s equally glacially-paced hitman movie which mystified audiences last year. Jarmusch notoriously shot the two hour picture from a screenplay of just 25 pages, yet folded into the visuals and spare conversational exchanges a cornucopia of allusions and symbols. The film is teeming with meaning, but never once stoops to lecturing its audience. Contrast this with The American, which is adapted from a novel (A Very Private Gentleman, by Martin Booth), yet feels like 25 pages’ worth of ideas – narrative and thematic – wrung out to feature length.

Patronising reviews have accused the film’s detractors of presuming Bourne movie thrills, pinning their misgivings on a cut-and-dry case of mismatched expectations. The disappointment has nil to do with its being boring or slow (besides, the former is untrue, and the second often a virtue), but rather its being unsatisfactorily conventional and slight. For no matter how you chicly dress it, pulp is still pulp, and The American is self-loathing pulp in denial.

DIRECTOR: Anton Corbijn

SCREENWRITER: Rowan Joffe

CAST: George Clooney, Violante Placido, Thekla Reuten, Paolo Bonacelli, Johan Leyson

RATING: MA15+

RUN TIME: 105 minutes