The American

This is a film about a professional killer who has to go into hiding in a beautiful Italian village. There are plenty of picture-postcard shots of the village, which is piled beautifully on the side of a hill. Hiding George Clooney in an Italian village seems as good an idea as hiding a herd of sheep in my sitting room. Why not Milton Keynes? Still, at least Clooney didn't have far to go to work while he was making the film because I think he may have a home in Italy. As one might predict, he doesn't fade into the brickwork and is quickly spotted and forced into conversation by the priest, despite his instructions to avoid friendships. Not content with the priest he frequents a glitzy brothel and falls in love with his chosen prostitute and wants to 'go straight' and run away with her, apparently unaware of the number one rule of professional killer films: these guys can't just decide to go straight and walk away from their past.

So here we have it, an American isolated in an Italian village with two alliterative human contacts, a priest and a prostitute. They both perceptively remark that he is secretive. He is secretive with good reason because he has just, in a pre-credit scene, killed a woman he had previously been making love to by shooting her in the head at point blank range.

There are some incidental scenes that don't ring true. which I attribute to variable screenwriting by Rowan Joffe, who has written, apart from this film, 28 Weeks Later and Last resort, as well as TV plays. He has now directed a remake of Brighton Rock, which has received considerable praise. The American is directed by Anton Corbijn (no, I don't know how to pronounce it), who's first film, Control, was about Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, who killed himself. Corbijn made his name as a photographer. The American is based on a novel by Martin Booth

The awful violence and cliched quality of the pre-credit scene (in the love-making part they were before an open fire, she naked on the bed) got me off to a bad start. After the credits there were more cliches: fetishisation of the gun, with detailed scenes of dismantling and assembly of precision parts, scenes I've seen an uncountable number of times in other films. I think that if one is going to show such material it needs some freshness. There is a scene in which he is pursued though the village, resulting in two bodies, so it seems, but this implausibly doesn't seem to bring out the local plod, knocking on his door.

Nevertheless for me the film found its rhythm and I started to enjoy its leisurely 'European' pace. He was able to frequent some nice-looking restaurants that I wish were more local to me. I admire George Clooney and I admired him again for taking such a downbeat part, which many stars of his magnitude wouldn't have done.

A fresh element in the film is the fact that the Clooney figure, although a professional killer, is not a free spirit, but he is a flunky in a hierarchy of command, taking his orders by telephone, cowed rather than in control, and looking as unhappy and oppressed as Clooney is able to do. He has a good crack at it.