Jack is an assassin. He wants out. His boss tells him, "Consider this your last job. You don't even have to pull the trigger." Jack holes up in a small town in the Italian countryside. He befriends a priest who observes, "You have the hands of a craftsman." "I do what I'm good at," Jack replies. He befriends a beautiful prostitute, also observant, who declares, "You are a good man, but you have a secret." The two grow close. "I can't stay forever," he warns. "Take me with you," she begs. Jack has enemies everywhere. Who can be trusted?

All this and nothing more can be gleaned from The American's trailer. Though rife with cliches (see every sentence above), the trailer is stylish and sexy, and promises more than enough action and intrigue for one evening. Such is not the case.

It is barely hyperbolic to proclaim that the trailer contains more than half of the film's dialogue AND action shots, but I'd be lying if I didn't do so. The American is an inexhaustible bore, mostly comprised of pauses so pregnant they might as well be carrying sextuplets. The gorgeous cinematography - at its best when capturing the sumptuous landscape that is Violante Placido, the prostitute Clara - is the only wholly enjoyable aspect of the film.

George Clooney, one of Hollywood's last great leading men, is miscast (probably by himself) as a hit-man who has lost his edge and cannot stop making friends. Clooney has a face built to smile, and watching him avoid doing so for two hours is a weird kind of torture. (Matt Damon makes a much more convincing stoic in the Bourne films.) It is hard to imagine George, a veteran of so many blindingly entertaining projects, being pleased with The American, a film that fancies itself an elegant meditation on sin, salvation, love, and death, but forgets to include any actual relevant content regarding these themes, even on the deepest subtextual level. There is, however, some painfully blatant business with butterflies serving as a symbol of metamorphosis or transcendence or what-have-you. So enjoy that.

Sum...ology: Slow as sin and brutally boring.