Book vs. Movie. The debate has been around as long as movies have existed. The American Assassin novel, written by the late Vince Flynn is considered to be part of one of the best spy-thriller series that have been published. The Mitch Rapp character took some time to get brought to the big screen and maybe that length is what precipitated so many of the changes from the book to the movie.

It’s hard to know what to think when a well-beloved book is turned into a movie but the only thing that seems to be the same in this movie is the title and a few of the names and places. Honestly, for me, it’s probably the one that bothers me the most. The Shining and several other Stephen King novels fall into that category, though not The Dead Zone and The Shawshank Redemption which both nail their books pretty well.

I recently had an itch to rewatch American Assassin but I thought that it would be great to read the book first since that is something I’ve wanted to do for some time. The book turned out to be a true page-turner and I stayed up late way too many nights reading just one. more. chapter. 10 minutes after the last words were read from the book, the movie was queued up and playing. I recall seeing it before and something just didn’t connect when I was reading the book and I discovered why when seeing the movie again.

Though the book and the movie both introduce the Mitch Rapp character, so much of their introduction and this story is completely different. I actually went online to see if the story was from one of the other in the series of books. Turns out, it wasn’t, it’s just that the writers replaced quite a few different elements of the story to bring it to the big screen. Sadly, the movie was a bomb at the box office which killed all of its chances of becoming a franchise. I wonder if they had followed a little closer to the book if it would have been more successful. Unfortunately, we likely will never know.

It’s not that the movie was terrible but it just was so different from the book that I had different expectations than what was on screen. It’s ok to do both book and movie but just know that they are basically the same in name only.