Review

American Ultra

Drug dealer Rose (John Leguizamo) hangs out with one of his best customers, stoner Mike (Jesse Eisenberg), who is in fact a government agent recently deemed a liability and targeted for extermination.
Drug dealer Rose (John Leguizamo) hangs out with one of his best customers, stoner Mike (Jesse Eisenberg), who is in fact a government agent recently deemed a liability and targeted for extermination.

Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg) is an introverted, spacey stoner, content to live a simple, unassuming life living with his beautiful girlfriend, Phoebe (Kristen Stewart), in a small, dead-end town in West Virginia, working at a local convenience store, drawing comics about an astronaut ape and smoking copious weed whenever possible. But once his former handler, a CIA operative named Lasseter (Connie Britton), pops in the store to "activate" him, the small, meek proto-hippie turns into a very dangerous assassin, instantly killing a pair of agents sent to terminate him.

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Mike (Jesse Eisenberg) and his girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) enjoy a rare quiet moment in American Ultra.

If the setup to Nima Nourizadeh's violent action comedy sounds familiar, it's because the concept of the unlikely mega-assassin has more or less been strafed into our skulls at this point: Over the past few years, we've had the super-agent with amnesia (Jason Bourne movies), the young teen girl assassin (Hanna), the double-secret agent who doesn't know his own mission anymore (The Guest), a bunch of elderly former agents who re-form into a geriatric super team (RED), a dowdy, overweight female agent who takes on an arms dealer (Spy), and another dog-loving retiree, who swings back into action when his beloved pooch is killed (John Wick). It's as if Hollywood is determined to provide us with every mathematically possible permutation of the secret agent/super assassin before they've truly exhausted the potential of the genre.

American Ultra

80 Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Topher Grace, Connie Britton, Walton Goggins, John Leguizamo, Bill Pullman, Tony Hale, Stuart Greer

Director: Nima Nourizadeh

Rating: R, for strong, bloody violence, language throughout, drug use and some sexual content

Running time: 95 minutes

The trick in all of these films is to have an actor who can convey with equal dexterity the inept everyperson, seemingly incapable of anything dangerous, and the coldly efficient, brutal killing machine who dispenses lethal beat downs and expert marksmanship on a whim: Eisenberg, a gifted actor whose intelligence, nervous energy and dissociative haughtiness have highlighted several excellent films in the past, is simply not that kind of fellow.

In such roles as Mark Zuckerberg in David Fincher's The Social Network and Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky in The End of the Tour, Eisenberg has used his peculiar battery of uneasy tics, stumbling delivery and inconclusive gaze to maximum anti-social effect: We believe that he is the kind of guy who walks into any room and assumes he's the smartest person there. Here, watching him play a hesitant, apologetic stoner kid and worse, a secretly lethal assassin, he seems entirely out of his element. His line readings still have his oddly disaffected delivery, his eyes instinctively cutting away from whomever he's speaking with. You can see what Nourizadeh was going for -- casting Eisenberg is certainly a surprising and bold way to go against type -- but it's a failed bid. You just can't see him doing the sorts of things his character is asked to do.

If Eisenberg's performance is rooted too firmly in what we might call the terra firma of reality (the actor really shines in cinema verite projects), the situation he finds his character thrust into, with a horde of deadly assassins from a rival CIA project led by the squirmy Yates (Topher Grace) descending on the small town and turning it into a mini-war zone, is straight out of a graphic novel.

After the initial botched assassination attempt, Mike goes on the lam with Phoebe to what he hopes will be a safehouse: the guarded compound of his drug dealer (John Leguizamo). When that fails and the body count begins to rise exponentially, more and more agents are dispatched to take him out, including Laugher (Walton Goggins), another programmed super-agent from a rival program, who speaks as if he has had a frontal lobotomy. By the bloody conclusion, a showdown in a low-rent department store, Mike is taking out hordes of trained killers and dispatching them with ease.

Which suggests another problem of the film. It flits constantly between Mike the programmed killer and Mike the spacey stoner, so much that many of his escapes simply rely on the age-old Hollywood maxim that even trained killers and assassins can't hit a heroic moving target, even from point blank range. To pull off the film's conceit, Mike would, like Bourne, have to show almost preternatural ability and composure. Instead, the filmmakers have him cowering behind desks and refrigerators with his fingers stuck in his ears as if to block out the carnage going on around him, only to emerge with a pair of scissors or a mallet to dispatch everyone around him.

The film is going for that graphic novel sweet spot where the sex and drama is toned way down, but the extremely explicit violence is cranked all the way up. Heads are cut off, blown apart and shot through, spoons are hastily dispatched into necks, and blood flies around the screen as in a slaughterhouse. Not for nothing is Mike shown to be a profoundly gifted comic artist (the film pores over the images of his comic creation ape in loving appraisal) but if that's the vibe you're after, Eisenberg, who with his anxiety and deadpan, trailing-off voice conveys little of what you might call human emotion, is simply not your guy.

The whole project has this kind of sham feel to it, a bunch of ideas that probably sounded riotously funny the night before, giggling over a series of bong hits but a lot less so the next morning, with a screaming headache and a coffee table covered with half-drunk bottles of beer stuffed with cigarette stubs, when you finally wake up on the couch. This one should probably have just stayed a stoner fantasy.

MovieStyle on 08/21/2015

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