The stoner comedy has a long, if not pedigreed, history. The unsuspecting super-agent espionage film has been done before as well. So, in this day of mash-ups and remixing, why not put the two genres together? American Ultra may be the answer to that question.
In fact, a mash-up of stoner comedy and unsuspecting super-agent is a perfect description of this Max Landis written, Nima Nourizadeh directed film. Jesse Eisenberg is Mike Howell, a stoner who doesn’t realize that he’s actually a castoff from a secret government program. If he’s activated, he has the ability to kill people with a myriad of weapons, as well as things that no one would ever suspect of even being weapons.
All Mike knows is that he is desperately in love with his girlfriend, Phoebe Larson (Kristen Stewart), and wants to do whatever he can to make her happy. Unfortunately, he’s a relatively addled guy and gets absolutely nothing right about his relationship. Early on in the film he has trouble getting on a plane to take Phoebe on vacation and from there things get really bad for him.
As it turns out, there’s this guy in the government, Adrian Yates (Topher Grace), who very much wants Mike dead. In fact, Yates wants him dead so badly that he organizes a massive, unsanctioned, mission to kill Mike. The only thing Mike, who has no idea Yates exists, has going for him is that he’s got a defender in the government, Victoria Lasseter (Connie Britton). Naturally, Mike doesn’t know her either — at least consciously — but she activates Mike so he can defend himself against Yates’ goons.
Mike does this self-defense thing, the unsanctioned mission goes downhill quickly, there are cover-ups and weird assassins — most notably Walton Goggins’ deranged Laugher — and a drug dealer played by John Leguizamo who gets caught up in the middle of it. All the while, Mike manages to take down bad guys with whatever he has on hand, and without even realizing what he’s going to do before he does it.
It sounds like a weird, potentially wonderful action-comedy. The problem is that it never really hits the absurd heights of the premise. After the first set of kills — which, one has to give it to American Ultra, are very inventive — the law of diminishing returns quickly sets in. Mike’s laidback style and regular disbelief in what’s he doing gets old fast.
While on their own the action scenes would probably go dull before the climax, American Ultra, oddly, makes a decision right up front to further lessen their impact. At the start of the film, a bruised and battered Mike thinks back to how this whole series of unfortunate events began. American Ultra then actually shows the audience, in reverse, many of the bigger moments. The result is that when the audience sees a certain location or an item, they know what’s about to happen. The rewind does look very cool, but it substantially hurts the film.
Beyond that, the entire storyline involving exactly why Yates wants to kill Mike and how he thinks he’s going to get away with it feels even more improbable than the notion of Eisenberg’s stoner-killer. Grace is not terribly convincing as the young boss who has decided to proceed with this off-the-wall mission, even if we have seen the actor play a similar role — the company-man trying to shake things up — before.
On the plus side, Eisenberg and Stewart have great chemistry together. Despite their relationship seeming like a highly improbable one, when Mike and Phoebe are on screen together the audience is pulling for them to somehow live through the night.
One issue with creating a film that is part stoner comedy and part espionage adventure is that while Mike and Phoebe straddle both worlds, very few other characters do. This leads to too many scenes feeling like they belong in one world or the other.
And then there are the scenes which really belong in neither. Tony Hale plays a scared, bumbling agent not sure whether his allegiances should lie with Lasseter or Yates and it is a comedic role — and one in which he is very funny — but it is neither stoner comedy nor espionage adventure.
