Movie Review: 'American Night' Starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers

I would tell you that I hate the new movie American Night starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Jeremy Piven but, I’m not sure what it is that I hate? Truly, is this a movie? It's more like pure chaos in the shape of a movie. Between the sub-Tarantino attempt at mixing up chapters or character perspectives, the baffling attempts at what I think is humor, or the pointless, meaningless, character death and violence, there are so many things to hate about American Night that I am almost too tired to care enough to hate American Night.

American Night seems to star Jonathan Rhys Meyers as a former art world bad boy trying to go legit. Meyers’ John Kaplan was once a beloved figure in the art world until he started trading in forgeries and ended up on the wrong side of a gangster named Lord Samuel, played by Michael Madsen. At least, I think that’s what happened. American Night is such a chaotic mess of time shifts and dangling plot threads that I can’t be sure of anything other than the character names, unless the production notes are as much of a mess as the movie is.

John is sometimes in a relationship with Sarah, played by Paz Vega. We see them have sticky paint covered sex but then he’s sleeping with someone else but also carrying a ring so he can ask Sarah to marry him? He owns an art gallery and she also owns a gallery or works at one? She restores art or she’s a curator or she’s both? At one point he promises Sarah he will come back for her but he doesn’t seem to actually go anywhere, so why is he portentously promising to come back for her? They both live in New York City with their own art galleries, are they running away from that? No, it’s just another among many stray lines of dialogue that mean nothing.

John has a step-brother named Vincent, played by Jeremy Piven. Vincent is a movie stuntman, or he was a movie stuntman. He gets fired from his job at some point in the story and has to ask John for money. John makes Vincent seem like he’s bad news, like he’s some ne’er do well that he has to pay off to go away but at no point does Piven do anything other than be a loser. Piven’s arc is that he’s accidentally given a valuable painting and he has a bizarre fascination with Bruce Lee and tries to do martial arts blind folded, for… reasons.

The painting is the macguffin of American Night. The painting, Warhol’s famed Pink Marilyn Monroe, in this story, once belonged to an Italian mob family. The painting was either sold or stolen and the scion of the mob family, Michael, played by Emile Hirsch, is willing to do anything to get the painting back. He somehow knows that the painting is coming to America from Japan and the courier who is bringing it, a narcoleptic man named Shaky, played by Fortunato Cerlino.

When Michael’s goons fail to kill or capture Shaky, the painting ends up with Vince and then, who the hell knows. American Night is such a chaotic, misbegotten hash of violent nonsense that I could not spoil the movie if I explained every detail through the ending. Director Alessio Della Valle has created such a misshapen mess of a movie that it is almost incomprehensible. The film has chapters, Art+Life, Life+Art, Art+Life=Chaos. There is art and there is chaos but what any of it is supposed to add up to is a mystery to me.

There are several other characters, several female characters who you will need a scorecard to tell apart, characters die but then don’t? Characters arrive at places at random with motivation that appears to make sense to them and possibly the screenplay writer but never to us, the people who are enduring the madness that is American Night. Flashbacks, flash forwards, double crosses and time shifts, American Night is an utter atrocity of failed screenplay trickery.

I mentioned the violence and one particular scene stands out, the ending which features a character, whom I believe is Michael’s girlfriend though her random appearances and relatively little dialogue fail to give her much context. She could be his maid for all that makes any sense in American Night. She’s blonde and exotic and for some unknown reason, director Della Valle thought it would be awesome to splatter her brains all over a window. It’s the most graphic death in the movie and it belongs to a character who is barely a character.

The ending of American Night, this smug, incomprehensible ending. This movie ends with a character lamenting what a beautiful American Night it is. It’s supposed to be poetic but the movie and the character have done so little to earn any such poetry. There is a massive shootout, nearly all the main players are shot and nothing in American Night means anything because the violence appears to be the point. If there is a point in American Night, it’s the pointless violence.

Della Valle is Italian by birth so perhaps this is his big commentary on American movies, how violent and nasty they are. I could assume that’s the point but, again, it’s hard to divine any point from anything that happens in American Night. American Night is merely an exhausting series of shifting timelines, gun violence and explosions. In the abstract, that’s a pretty good satire of American blockbusters but that’s more my take than it is anything I can actually find in American Night.

American Night opens in limited release on October 1st, 2021.