The Bourne trilogy riffed on the idea of an undercover CIA operative who is so thoroughly brainwashed he no longer knows who he is. American Ultra mines that same scenario for laughs. Where Matt Damon looked the part, the weedy Jesse Eisenberg is very far from central casting. Indeed, nothing in his career so far has suggested that he could punch his way out of a paper bag.
That includes the film’s opening scenes, which position Mike as a geeky stoner working the till at a convenience store in the fictional Liman, West Virginia. His girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) is the competent one who rescues the omelette from burning, owns quite a nice Subaru and fields his constant apologies. Then one night he gets mugged by two armed thugs. Without an idea how, he dispatches both in a trice and is soon banged up by the sheriff. More killers arrive and this time Mike needs a little longer to do them in.
Meanwhile at CIA headquarters a turf spat has broken out between Mike’s former handler Lasseter (Connie Britton, pictured) and her preppy younger boss Yates (Topher Grace), who has decided to flex his muscles by wiping out her sleeper agent, the only success of a programme to train up mental patients as government assassins.
The script by Max Landis has a twist or two along the way, including a nice reveal about Phoebe that gives Stewart more to do than look on admiringly as Eisenberg lays waste to all-comers. “You’re his girlfriend, his mom, his maid and now you’re his lawyer?” says the cop when she advises him under arrest. Maybe that’s not all she is.
The film crescendos into a festival of splatty, splurgy cartoon violence: director Nima Nourizadeh has been hard at study of action genre tropes. Gore has not been this glorified in a comedy since James Gunn’s Super, in which a loser cast himself as a horribly vengeful superhero.
Are the laughs good enough to keep pace with all the punctured flesh? More or less. The joke of Mike’s incomprehension holds up reasonably well (“Is that a lyric?” he asks when greeted by a bafflingly coded message from Lasseter). Before he has accepted his destiny as a ruthless killer, Mike frets neurotically that he may be a robot. The best laughs are at the expense of the CIA, though there’s nothing to match the sheer bliss of Robert de Niro outwitting the Agency in Midnight Run. Eisenberg and Stewart are likeable, and there are fun cameos for John Leguizamo as a paranoid drug dealer who thinks he’s black and Bill Pullman as a national security capo. The film seems all set to cue up a sequel, but instead compresses it into the closing minutes. By then, the joke has done its job and run its course.
Overleaf: 'Piss My Pants' – watch a clip from American Ultra
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