'A Total Mess': Patch Reviews 'American Ultra'

By STEPHEN SILVER

If you saw all four films in the “Bourne Identity” series and your reaction was “I like this, except it would be so much better if Jason Bourne were an incongruously long-haired stoner,” then “American Ultra” will likely go down as your favorite movie of the year.

For everyone else, though? Yikes. This is a nonsensical failure of a movie.

“American Ultra,” directed by “Project X”’s Nima Nourizadeh, has the high-concept idea to tie together two very different genres: The stoner comedy and the explosion-filled action spy thriller.

It’s not out of the realm of possibility that such a concept could work, but it certainly doesn’t this time. “American Ultra” is a mess in which it’s hard to decide what makes less sense- the plot or the action. That it wastes an impressive collection of very good actors just adds to the sadness.

The film stars Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart- previously seen as a couple in the much, much better “Adventureland” from 2009- as what appear to be a pair of young-and-in-love stoners in rural West Virginia. He’s nervous, awkward and prone to panic attacks- working in a convenience store while dreaming of a career as a cartoonist- while she’s surprisingly understanding about it all.

A series of surprises shows that things were actually a lot complicated, with the plot eventually pulling in CIA office politics, a secret super-soldier program, and even domestic drone strikes. The big villain is Topher Grace, turning the smarm up to about a thousand as an evil CIA bureaucrat.

Where does this film go wrong? Where do we start? The plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and the action sequences are shot ineptly and nonsensically. If the film is trying to make a political point about overreaches of the CIA or drone usage, it goes about it in the most roundabout, far-from-reality manner possible.

Eisenberg, great an actor as he is, is horribly miscast and just plain not right (he’s used to much better effect in this week’s “The End of the Tour”.) The talents of Walton Goggins are completely wasted as an assassin; I’m not sure whose idea it was to cast one of our most erudite actors as a monosyllabic mumbler. Actors from John Leguizamo to Connie Britton to Bill Pullman to Huell from Breaking Bad drift through the film, although Tony Hale has some amusing moments as a drone operator, while Stewart gives probably the movie’s least objectionable performance.

Action and stoners can go together- remember “The Pineapple Express”? But “American Ultra” falls considerably short of whatever it was attempting to do.

“American Ultra” is playing at AMC Marple 10, Regal Cinema Edgmont 10, AMC Granite Run 8 and UA King of Prussia Stadium 16 IMAX & RPX, among other local theaters.