Stoner comedy goes to pot
Clever touches not enough to light up screen in this hybrid action movie
As Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg) and his girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) sit — while getting lightly stoned — bathed in the emergency lights of the cop cars and ambulances attending to a nearby car wreck, he’s suddenly overcome with a tragic thought. The turbo red sports car recently destroyed was one of the freest things on the planet, zipping around roads however its owner pleased, until it ran smack into the tree it’s now wrapped around. That tree that was just sitting there, presumably content in one place for dozens and dozens of years. Mike, an inveterate stoner who works at a convenience store and can’t even leave the city limits without breaking down in an anxiety attack, worries that he’s that tree, permanently ending the wild ride Phoebe might have gone on without him.
So besides being a hybrid stoner comedy/action movie, a sort of hyperviolent Pineapple Express, American Ultra also plays into the grand tradition of the secret hero, the chosen one who will rise from a nobody with inglorious beginnings to THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON ALIVE, or at least the most important person in small-town West Virginia. It would be just like a stoner to indulge such delusions of grandeur.
That car-crash pillow-talk scene also reveals, at least, a certain offbeat humour, which is to say American Ultra is better at being a stoner comedy than being anything else. And it’s not a particularly clever stoner comedy. Though maybe that’s just because the Eisenberg-Stewart pairing draws a lingering comparison to Adventureland, which is such an achingly better movie I actually feel kind of bad bringing it up in this context at all. Sorry, forget I said anything.
Anyway, these moments come best in the early going, not just when Mike is worrying about what he’s doing to Phoebe, but also when he’s trying to buy her a fireworks surprise from sleazeball Rose (John Leguizamo) — who earnestly wants to drop acid and hit the strip bar at eight in the morning — or running through ideas for his comic — a never-gonna-be-published affair involving a space ape and a duplicitous dog ( because dogs are man’s best friend, not monkey’s best friend).
These scenes linger, but slowly get bled out as the action movie swings into ... uh, action. Turns out Mike is a pawn in a CIA plot, a successfully trained and then brainwashed secret agent whose program has been liquidated, which means it’s time for him to get the same. Warned/activated by his handler Victoria (Connie Britton), he goes on the run from the dastardly government forces lead by snot-nosed ladder-climber Adrian (Topher Grace), using a series of Bourne-esque creative killing methods and stoner logic to try to solve his own mystery.
There are some clever touches in among the brutally bloody fight scenes, not the least of which is turning highly classified and extremely dangerous spycraft into what amounts to a pissing match between CIA higherups: There’s a fine way to suggest your security apparatus might not always have its citizens’ best interests in mind. Lighter on the political commentary, Walton Goggins as an increasingly toothless assassin with a verbal tic is one of the weirder additions to an action film this year, and it makes for an interesting counterpoint to Eisenberg’s obviously unqualified action star: These weirdos need to stick together while killing people.
Still, even if the sight of Mark Zuckerberg killing people with a spoon is pleasingly incongruous, as an action movie Ultra is essentially a gory blur, both frantic and airless. A sequence in a blacklit basement approaches cleverness, but by and large it settles into a rhythm of run, kill, repeat, limiting its stabs at humour to offbeat ways of doing the second. Combined with a plot that steadily parcels out Mike’s backstory beat after predictable beat and a gratingly over-the-top performance from Grace, it’s enough to make you wish American Ultra had just let Mike live out his rooted-in life.