AMERICAN ULTRA (Nima Nourizadeh). 96 minutes. Opens Friday (August 21). Rating: NNNN
Where to watch: iTunes
American Ultra is a stoner spin on The Bourne Identity, with Jesse Eisenberg playing Mike Howell, a sweet-natured West Virginia pothead, convenience-store clerk and occasional cartoonist who discovers he’s a brainwashed CIA super-soldier – and that his former employers are trying their best to take him out. This would be annoying even if he wasn’t just about to propose to his girlfriend (Kristen Stewart).
As a fusion of action-movie language and paranoid drug culture, American Ultra is more successful than other recent attempts. Max Landis’s screenplay is smarter about what it does and doesn’t tell the audience, and its paranoid-thriller logic, with government suits dispatching teams of assassins to take out a rogue asset, is more suited to the stoner mindset than the self-conscious 80s action movie worship of David Gordon Green’s Pineapple Express.
Much as he did in his misunderstood house party comedy Project X, director Nima Nourizadeh undercuts the escalating mayhem with a queasy sense of tension – and Eisenberg is clearly on the same page, playing his stoner superhero as a terrified, confused victim of circumstance. Stewart, who co-starred with Eisenberg in Adventureland, is a little better at juggling the tricky tone, but her role gives her licence to do that – for a while, anyway.
Topher Grace, as the ambitious prick whose scheme sets all the carnage in motion, makes a terrific antagonist, and Nourizadeh casts the other key roles just as well. I’d never dream of revealing who gets the Clive Owen role in this Bourne remix, but trust me: it’s a great choice.
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