You don’t go into movies like “American Ultra” with high expectations. I mean, for the love of god, it’s about a stoner who is secretly a CIA agent, but doesn’t know it because his memories were erased.
You go to “American Ultra” because of the ridiculous story, the obnoxious actors, crude dialogue and over-the-top violence that borders on tacky. You are paying for a shit-show, not a prospective Oscar nominee. But, if you have a good writer and the right director, you won’t feel like you wasted your money.
This is not the case for “American Ultra” because it reeks of something torn from Quentin Tarantino’s reject pile.
Mike Howell, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is your typical white trash small-town guy. He works at a convenience store, lives with his girlfriend Phoebe, played by Kristen Stewart — who he thinks is too good for him — and he smokes a lot of weed.
Mike doesn’t know that he once volunteered in a CIA experiment in which he became an assassin and now the CIA wants to exterminate him.
Two agents are sent to kill Mike and instead he stabs one in the neck with a spoon and shoots the other in the head.
From there, the film spirals into Mike and Phoebe running from the CIA while Mike tries to figure out what is happening to him and also trying to find the right moment to propose.
Don’t get me wrong, I laughed at this film. It’s so ridiculous, it’s hard not to. There’s a wonderful scene where Phoebe becomes the voice of the audience by expressing our thoughts at a few of Mike’s stupid choices. Stewart also gave the film an emotional depth I wasn’t expecting.
The problem with “American Ultra” is that it exists in this inconsistent realm of cover and parody. The script writer, Max Landis, just couldn’t seem to decide if he wanted to be a part of the action genre or make fun of it.
He also couldn’t decide on just one ending because he used two pretty typical outro scenes, the second of which was completely unnecessary.
Outside of just production problems, the film makes a huge moral faux pas by allowing a non-black character to use the N-word multiple times. And I don’t know if that was Landis’s way of showing he could be edgy, but there are other ways of covering up your blatant lack of script writing talent than using racial slurs and trying to pass them off as a character’s weird little quirk.
I was expecting “American Ultra” to be bad, but not that bad.
