[rating=7.00]
First the bad. American Ultra is, quite possibly, about as dumb a movie as you can see. It’s a genre mashup that offers nothing new for either of its genres, taking stock stoner characters and putting them into stock superspy situations. Nothing you see here is anything you haven’t seen before in a hundred different ripoffs of Cheech and Chong or a hundred different riffs on Bond. It’s a mindless farce that’s certainly going to have more than its fair share of detractors. I am not one of them. No, I found myself charmed by the idiocy, realizing very early on that this was a film to be taken solely at face value. It may be dumb, even for what it is, but it never tried to be anything else, and I can accept that.
Jesse Eisenberg stars as directionless pothead Mike Howell, a loveable loser with zero aspirations for his life who can’t even leave his small, West Virginia town without experiencing crippling panic attacks, a fact that derails his plans to propose to his girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) in Hawaii. Mike is simply content with working his low key job at the town market, hanging out with his pot dealer Rose (John Leguizamo), and being in love with Phoebe. As it turns out, Mike’s panic attacks are part of a post-hypnotic suggestion implanted by the CIA with whom Mike is a sleeper agent. His repeated attempts to leave town catch the concern of the agency’s up and coming Adrian Yates (Topher Grace) who orders a hit on Mike for the interest of national security. Unbeknownst to him, or even to Mike, his target becomes reactivated, turning this stoner into a stone-cold killer.
It sounds kind of stupid. Hell, it is kind of stupid, I won’t argue that point. There’s nothing about American Ultra you can’t garner in total from even a cursory watch of its trailer. It is what it is and nothing more. If you can allow yourself to get past that, you’ll see a movie that’s 100% earnest in its mindlessness and absolutely heartfelt in its stupidity. Like Mike, American Ultra has the balls to be underachieving and it’s a dynamic that works completely in the movie’s favor.
Working from a script from Chronicle scribe Max Landis, director Nima Nourizadeh has crafted a film that’s the ultimate in face value good times. He, and all involved, seem to have an understanding of how bad this movie could potentially be and so, in opposition, they went over the top. It’s a movie that embraces its camp without any hint of irony or pretension. There are no winks and nods, no attempts to intellectualize or add nuance. The movie itself seems to say, “Here, watch this. It’s kind of dumb but we had fun with it.”
To that point, American Ultra is pretty damn fun if you allow it to be. Eisenberg and Stewart have an undeniable chemistry that’s almost too impossibly cute for words. They’re the perfect epitome of young, dumb, and in love and quickly become a couple you want to see succeed because, dammit, they deserve each other. As bloody as the movie gets—and it gets seriously bloody—it is, in its heart, a quirky romantic comedy. It’s in this dichotomy that the movie finds its charm and its fun. The violence borders on the grotesque with its explosive headshots and geysers of blood, and as Mike and Phoebe become more and more coated in the viscera of their assassins, their love and adoration becomes more and more impossibly cute.
It’s not an easy juxtaposition to embrace, not by any means. American Ultra is not a movie for everyone and, as such, should be approached with caution. Like the effects of a bowl of your roommate’s finest green, the more you try to fight American Ultra the worse your time becomes. It’s best, then, to just roll with it and let it happen because to do otherwise runs the risk of sending your high to the bad place. So check your brain in the lobby—or, most likely, in the center console of your car, where you and I both know you “hide” your “secret” stash—and enjoy the movie for everything it is instead of criticizing it for everything it isn’t. With this approach, American Ultra easily becomes a damn fun time at the theaters and, sometimes, that’s all a movie needs to be.
American Ultra is now playing in theaters everywhere.
