ULTRA SILLY AND ULTRA VIOLENT

ALREADY this year we’ve had Melissa McCarthy’s rotund secretary in spy, and Taron Egerton’s working-class tearaway in Kingsman: The secret service. Now, joining this burgeoning band of improbable agents, comes Jesse Eisenberg (pictured) as drugaddled agoraphobe Mike howell, scraping a living in hicksville, West Virginia, trying to muster the courage to propose to his longsuffering but loyal girlfriend Phoebe, and actually so deeply undercover he has no idea he’s anything other than what everyone in town thinks he is: an amiable, perpetually stoned loser. American Ultra starts promisingly, as what appears to be a tragi-comic study of two ordinary if rather unwholesome young people and their loving relationship. Mike buys plane tickets to hawaii so he can pop the question in style, but has a panic attack at the airport, letting Phoebe down again. That she still seems besotted with him is something of a mystery. But then there arise questions other than the one Mike wants to pop. such as, why does the CIA want him dead, and why is it prepared to slaughter anyone who gets in the way of its deadly objective? The answer, which comes early enough in the film not to be read as a spoiler, is that Mike has had his memory wiped by those rotters at CIA headquarters, who trained him to be a super-efficient killer, then turned him into a ‘sleeper’ as part of the agency’s $400 million Ultra programme. Now they want to wind up the programme, so he needs eliminating. it’s all unspeakably daft, but a kind of faux-seriousness helps it along, as do the performances of Eisenberg — so good at playing a misfit, as he showed in rather different circumstances, as Facebook tycoon Mark Zuckerberg, in The social Network — and the like-able stewart. They have an engaging chemistry on screen, first ignited in Greg Mottola’s 2009 comedy Adventureland. i had two problems with American Ultra, however. One was a lingering sense that it would have been a more interesting film without the CIA stuff. Also, (British) director Nima Nourizadeh lavishes on his picture a level of violence that would not look out of place in a slasher movie. Why can’t films be made without at least one person getting his head cleaved in two, bullets being tracked in slowmotion, or blood flying like water in a paddling-pool full of toddlers? it is the curse of our cinematic age.