The trouble with Mike Howell, the ambition-deficient convenience store clerk that Jesse Eisenberg plays in the middling American Ultra, is that he keeps receiving bad news while high. Bad news—like, say, the news that the United States government has sent highly trained black-ops agents to terminate you with extreme prejudice—always seems much worse to the stoned individual, and so Mike’s natural recourse is to get more high to alleviate his stress about the developing situation. But then, of course, Mike’s even more zonked when he’s thrown into the next inevitable high-pressure situation, and the cycle perpetuates itself over and over.
If director Nima Nourizadeh had focused his efforts on pursuing the “Jason Bourne stuck in a perpetual dabs freakout” angle, he could’ve come up with enough comedy and paranoiac dread to fill out a feature-length film. But like the wasteoid who trails off mid-sentence to get lost in the cover art for Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, Nourizadeh has trouble concentrating on a single organizing narrative mode for his film. He struggles to bridge the gaps between genres, unsuccessfully attempting to hybridize indie romance, deafening action, and doofy stoner humor into a potent new strain of entertainment. The end result of his tinkering with formula is a tonally inconsistent hodgepodge that’s close to working but not quite there.
American Ultra plays best before it really gets going, in the scenes of domestic tranquility between Mike and his girlfriend, Phoebe. Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, the latter shaking off the last of the doubts persisting from her Twilight days, go together like Mario Kart and peanut-butter Oreos. As Mike and Phoebe, they while away the days in their sleepy West Virginian hamlet of Liman by torching weed, making omelettes, and cuddling under the starry country sky. Mike worries that his dearth of ambition—he wants to get a comic book called Apollo Ape off the ground, but lacks follow-through—is holding his paramour back in life, but their heart-to-heart gets derailed when a mysterious woman (Connie Britton) visits Mike at work late one night and speaks a nonsensical phrase. She’s a government operative who’s come to warn Mike that he’s in danger, and the word salad she feeds him triggers his latent ass-kicking superpowers. Mike misattributes his spotty memory to an illustrious career in recreational substance use, when it turns out that the CIA wiped his mind after they were finished using him as a guinea pig for an experimental program to produce inhumanly deadly agents. (To Mike’s relief, at least he’s not a robot.)
A ladder-climbing CIA bureaucrat (Topher Grace, insufferable as ever, except this time that’s the point) approves an operation to tie up the loose ends on that failed experiment by gunning down Mike, and just like that, the Bourne comparisons are secured. A veteran of the hip-hop music-video circuit and the brain behind 2012’s grating and loud Project X, Nourizadeh clearly relishes the opportunity to get his action-choreography ya-yas out. The numerous combat set pieces gobble the film’s runtime whole, spoiling their own creativity with gratuitous violence. While his self-selected binary between shaky-cam and overreaching slow-motion doesn’t do him any favors, the bulk deal he must’ve gotten on squib packs only makes matters worse. Mike’s ability to kill a man using the most innocuous of household objects—early on, a cup o’ noodles becomes a lethal weapon in his hands—scores points for sheer novelty, but for a movie this purportedly chillaxed, the action comes off as brutal and joyless.
Nourizadeh has lots of growing up to do, but curiously enough, the scenes of idiots sitting around and shooting bull are its most successful. When coasting, Nourizadeh’s got a lot of charm from his leading actors to fall back on. But the action scenes, inexplicably the mode that the film favors most heavily, try far too hard and leave little impact. With American Ultra, Nourizadeh dishes out a three-for-one special: He’s directed a commendable character drama, a passable stoner comedy, and a risible thriller flick.
