Review of American Ultra (2015) by Stuart M — 27 Nov 2015

The basic premise is promising: stoner kid discovers that he's a sleeper agent for the government and has to elude trained assassins. I saw a Star Trek episode that did that once and it was good. But the devil is in the details. Who's trying to kill him? It's the government. Why? Why is the government trying to kill their own project? For that matter, why are they willing to wipe out an entire time to do so (apparently the cunning plan of using freed mental patients to conduct subtle stealth missions wasn't so cunning)? And I still don't know that. It's stated that it's because he kept trying to leave town (he gets travel sickness whenever he tries to fly, a clever touch) but why is that a reason to kill somebody? And why did this get set off when they spotted him smoking a joint outside his store? None of it makes sense. And from there we're given a string of generic assassins who they drive off in short order. Here we've got the second problem: for a new deluxe type of assassin he's not particularly good. I mean, sure he kills people, but he doesn't really seem much better than the regular goons. For that matter the goons don't seem much better than normal people. So what's the point of this nifty new government assassin program? And why does the film go out of its way to demonize the government so badly (they straight up murder innocent people, even their own guys, from the highest levels to the lowest) and yet still treat them like the good guys (we're expected to believe that becoming a government agent is a happy ending).

It's unfortunate that this film goes so badly off because the leads are eminently likeable. They have great chemistry together and they both seem working class enough to blend in to the setting. Adorkable seems to sum them up. Kirsten Stewart demonstrates once again for the doubters that she can actually act, and she has pretty good comic timing. Jesse Eisenberg might be overselling the bumbling a little, but it does make his comic moments funnier. And as I said the idea had potential. It just didn't think carefully enough about what it wanted to be.