Review: ‘The American’ misses the mark

George Clooney’s new thriller “The American” takes itself very seriously. Not the bait-and-switch seriousness you would find in a Jason Bourne movie, where “realism” is just a camera style; and not the op-ed seriousness we get from “Michael Clayton,” or “Syriana”, where liberalism makes a pact with entertainment. No, this is a different register altogether: a hit-man movie concerned purely with …