In a summer film slate awash with reboots, sequels and dutifully box-checking superhero product, it’s refreshing to determine a genre film constructed from a completely original screenplay. Yet “American Ultra,” a stoner action-comedy directed by Nima Nourizadeh at a script by Max Landis, too frequently plays as an earnest yet unsatisfying adaptation of an cult graphic novel, with a lot of of the charm lost in translation. Full of clever ideas, bloody violence so cartoonish that it’s almost cuddly, plus an eminently likable leading pair in Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg, the film provides extensive going for it but, just like a fridge-clearing omelet prepared after a great number of bong hits, it can’t find a way to cook every one of these goodies in to a palatable whole. Box office needs to be modest, though more couch-bound demographics could very well embrace it on homevid.
For a well-meaning, not-so-bright stoner who works with a run-down mini-mart and can’t leave his West Virginia hometown without suffering panic disorder, Mike Howell (Eisenberg) is quite content along with his lot in daily life. He lives inside a rainbow-shag-carpeted house along with his beloved Phoebe (Stewart, looking completely accustomed to stringy hair plus a faded violet dye job), who doesn’t manage to mind functioning as Mike’s “girlfriend, mother, maid and landlord,” inside the words of the uncomprehending local sheriff. His comicbook concept, Apollo Ape, appears like it could be a winner but only if he would invest time to actually write it. He’s even somehow scrounged up enough dough to get Phoebe a diamond ring, although the opportunity to pop the question keeps comically eluding him.
Nourizadeh does well to develop the loose, ambling rhythms of Mike’s life inside the opening reel, so that it is all the more striking when he’s accosted by two hitmen from the parking lot, and bloodily dispatches all of them the aid of your spoon as well as a cup of instant ramen. As we gradually put together along with our forgetful hero, Mike can be a sleeper agent in the clandestine CIA program, endowed with top-level martial-arts skills along with an encyclopedic understanding of weaponry. With the program long since abandoned, a smarmy young Agency bureaucrat (Topher Grace) decides to concentrate on Mike for extermination, leading his former trainer (Connie Britton) to visit rogue to rescue him.
The disconnect between Mike’s molasses-paced cognitive processes and killing-machine reflexes results in some clever comedy at the beginning, as his lower brain keeps getting him outside of jams his higher brain got him into. And the interplay between Eisenberg and Stewart is effortlessly charming, with Stewart adding some welcome kinks and quirks from what could have been a thankless girlfriend role. But since the film nears its midway point, few of its promising ideas are carried through, plus it devolves into a typical midrange actioner which simply happens to feature an unlikely hero on the center. (Imagine a latter-day Van Damme outfitted having a Kurt Cobain wig and also a “what, me worry?” countenance, and you’re halfway there.)
The film’s obvious antecedent, “Pineapple Express,” was thrilling since it committed equally to its Mutt-and-Jeff silliness and its particular genuinely brutal violence, giving its innocents-in-danger premise an unexpected amount of emotional weight. “American Ultra,” however, often plays as being a live-action Roadrunner cartoon, but minus the sense of stylistic anarchy to drag it off. Grace, particularly, goes too over-the-top to become effectively detestable, yet not far enough for being a satisfying comic villain, while Walton Goggins, being a goonish agency asset, drools and slobbers through his scenes as Mike’s primary adversary.
Nourizadeh helms a few in the action sequences by panache, particularly a late brawl within a grocery store, but he never is able to pin down an even tone, mashing up a range of cinematic styles without ever nailing any of them. Only with the end, with completely off-the-wall animated closing credits that embrace the film’s latent surreality, can we finally get yourself a glimpse of what “American Ultra” may be aching being.
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