American Ultra

Synopsis: A small-town stoner, Mike (Jesse Eisenberg), who works in the local convenience store and draws comics in his ample spare time discovers that he's actually part of a secret CIA program to develop a super-soldier. When the CIA decides to terminate him, he and his girlfriend, Phoebe (Kristen Stewart), must fight for their lives.
 
Part indie rom-com, part multiplex action movie, the aim of American Ultra is to be a hip genre mash-up for a (post-) adolescent audience. With its endearingly diffident hero and its fantasy-becomes-reality premise it is one of those films that you want to like but whose dogged failure to rise above the banal defeats you. 
 
Director Nima Nourizadeh, whose previous and debut feature was Project X which played like an extended party scene from Bad Neighbours together with writer Max Landis starts the film well enough in slacker territory with Mike and Phoebe classic non-conformist protagonists but once the action kicks in the film largely loses whatever grungy charm it had and becomes a familiar indulgence in hyperbolic screen violence (the name of the town in which the action takes place, Liman, is presumably a reference to Doug Liman, director of The Bourne Identity, 2002) as, in predictable form, faceless goons artilleried to the hilt prove incapable of taking down the hero and his spunky companion but manage to implement wholesale destruction in the process of not doing so.
 
Eisenberg and Stewart who have previously co-starred in the 2009 dramedy, Adventureland, will be the main draw-cards here but one cannot help wishing that they had chosen a better film for their reunion. Stewart is, as always, a compelling presence but the terminally-geeky, squeaky-clean Eisenberg is a poor choice for an action hero, or for that matter even a stoner. Topher Grace also fails to convince as an ambitious CIA operations manager. But then, nothing much convinces about this routine affair.

 

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