[yasr_overall_rating]
A stoner – who is in fact a government agent – is marked as a liability and targeted for extermination. But he’s too well-trained and too high for them to handle.
In “American Ultra,” a stoned, occasionally gruesome riff on “The Bourne Identity” crossed with “Zombieland” nuttiness, flavored with a touch of “First Blood” — a small-town pothead lives blissfully unaware of his past as a brainwashed super-soldier, programmed by the CIA to be able to kill anyone using anything. Then, an intra-agency power struggle results in a termination order, and within a few hours our hapless hero finds himself in the parking lot of the Cash-N-Carry, having just killed two black-ops gunmen using nothing more than a dull spoon and a cup of ramen noodles, with no understanding of how he did it or why. Operating within the logic of severely stoned paranoia, he concludes that he must be a robot.
Jesse Eisenberg plays a twitchy, anxiety-riddled Mike Howell, a perfectly twitchy Jason Bourne for our twitchy times. As a small-town convenience-store clerk, he hangs out with his undemanding girlfriend, Phoebe (Kristen Stewart), smokes dope, and suffers panic attacks every time he attempts to leave town. This of course all changes when Victoria Lasseter (Connie Britton) shows up and activates Mike’s super-soldier programming with a string of code words.
She is forced to do this to save Mike from opportunistic CIA agent, Adrian Yates (Topher Grace), who takes over Lasseter’s high ranking position. Adrian decides to neutralize the last person from Lasseter’s failed super-soldier experiment – Mike. Thus begins Mike and Phoebe’s outrageous battle against the black ops agents Yates continues to send after them.
I’m afraid that people will try and take the movie too seriously. They’ll look for plot development and deep character evolution. Many will find the extremely gory fight scenes excessive and a cop-out…but that’s where they’ll all be completely wrong. This movie is not meant to make you think about who you are, to contemplate where your life is going, to reminisce high school or college glory days or even to give you a challenging plot to follow and mystery to solve.
No. This movie is there for audience members to have a good time with, to laugh, to watch things blow up, and to see Mike and Phoebe win against all odds.
Nima Nourizadeh’s direction was all over the place with this movie. I equate it to watching my son flip between ‘views’ on his first-person-shooter video games. Using overhead shots, extreme close-ups, unnecessary slow-mo sequences, and digitally composited, flashing montages made it difficult to watch at times.
The violence is exaggerated into explosive blood spurts and doors, cars and kitchen appliances being ripped apart by gunfire. I guess this is to get the viewer hooked on the fun the filmmakers must have had in making it. It’s demented, occasionally inspired, but most often very funny.
As the movie progresses, we are pulled into a world that shows writer Max Landis has a beautiful understanding of how to show two people completely connected and in love. Through his script, coupled with Eisenberg and Stewart’s utterly natural staging and body language, I never doubt for a minute that Phoebe and Mike are completely and eternally in love with each other.
I was a little disappointed that a deeper explanation of the experiment that made Mike into a super-soldier was never revealed. All we really ever hear from CIA agent Lasseter is that her program, that Mike was a part of, was a failure because all the other test subjects went insane. It’s explained that Mike was reprogrammed to forget the experiment. Still, I would have liked to have seen some flashbacks to the training during all the montages.
So “Zombieland” – if Eisenberg had been half-baked, mixed with “The Bourne Identity” and a dash of sarcastic snark, made “American Ultra” a lot of fun. Be prepared for a lot of things to blow up and for over-the-top goofy gory fights.
In theaters August 21st
