Eisenberg and Stewart
There are action films, there are comedy movies and even the hybrid comedic-action flicks. Then there is American Ultra, a fast-paced, often illogical and violent 96-minute movie that finds a home on the intersection of humor and gory brutality, all the while trying to appeal to the everyday stoner.
American Ultra follows Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg), a dopey but well-meaning small-town pothead who has nothing going right for him except for his girlfriend Phoebe Larson, the steel-willed love of his life played by Kristen Stewart. Howell has his world turned upside-down when he discovers he is a sleeper agent for the United States – and that the government programmed him to believe in life as he knows it.
Howell becomes aware of his past as a government agent after Victoria Lasseter (Connie Britton), a high-ranking CIA agent who knows of a government plan to neutralize the unknowing stoner, utters code words to awaken him to his true identity and unmatched fighting skills.
The rest of the movie follows Howell’s fights with government hitmen at his job, county prison, the home of his drug dealer Rose (John Leguizamo) and eventually a local supermarket, the headquarters of the CIA agents hellbent on killing him – all while he learns more about his forgotten past.
As with many action films, the plot itself is nonsensical and often too fast-paced. Instead of sending a covert operation to take out Howell, the CIA tries to kill him with explosions, devilish looking characters with machine guns and, at last resort, a drone strike that would wipe out the entire town. The movie also does little to introduce Adrian Yates (Topher Grace), the antagonist of the film, as much more than a malicious hothead with a propensity for dropping the f-bomb every other sentence.
Questionable plot aside, the movie does its best to entertain with tender romance, vulgar humor and, most noticeably, imaginative fight scenes that find Howell using everyday objects like a spoon, fireworks and a cup of ramen noodles as weapons.
Thanks to their superb chemistry during intimate love scenes, Eisenberg and Stewart make the perfect underdog couple that you can’t help but admire and root for. Although the nature of their relationship inevitably evolves as Howell uncovers its true origins during the twists-and-turns of the movie, filmgoers will only become more invested in the star-crossed lovers.
The comedy in American Ultra is a mixed-bag, with about half the jokes drawing laughter from the crowd and the other half falling flat. For his part, Eisenberg has no trouble tickling the funny bone of the audience with his quirky awkwardness and lapses of common sense stereotypically associated with stoners.
However, Yates and Rose, the two characters seemingly created to inject most of the humor into the movie, aren’t all that funny. Yates’ main shtick is being an arrogant blowhard who deflates when faced with real danger. The character occasionally comes across as humorous, but a more judicious choice of obscenities and vulgar humor would greatly improve his comedic value. The main source of humor from Rose, on the other hand, stems from his love of drugs, strip clubs and his nickname for Howell. It feels like nothing more than a rehash of a character we’ve seen time and time again in blockbuster movies.
But none of that really matters in the end because of the ingenuitive fight scenes that ignore the laws of physics and just plain reality. Throughout the movie Howell is able to catch live grenades with enough time to toss them back, immediately continue fighting after a grazing bullet wound to the head and even perfectly ricochet a bullet off of a frying pan and into a gun-wielding bad guy.
The fight scenes are intense yet silly, jaw-dropping yet eyebrow-raising, sometimes hard to look at but even tougher to stop watching – a good summary of American Ultra, an over-the-top film that makes up what it lacks in cohesion with enthralling and bloody combat.
