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| Jesse Eisenberg spends much of American Ultra absolutely looking like shit on toast, and he really makes it work. |
Movies with stoner protagonists risk devolving into a series of cliches. You know. Smoking marijuana makes you hungry, it makes you laugh at things that aren't really funny, and it interferes with your short-term memory in ways that make you comically bad at performing simple tasks. Amirite?
American Ultra is none of that. It's original, ecomomical, and visually and formally beautiful. It isn't really a stoner movie for stoners. It's surprisingly dark and smart, and it doesn't suggest that being a stoner is a lot of fun. From the beginning of the movie, Jesse Eisenberg* appears to be trying to self-medicate, and it doesn't seem to be working very well.
And then, as you will know if you saw any of the previews, Jesse Eisenberg turns out to be a trained and conditioned secret agent so secret that he didn't realize he was one, and then a lot of people try to kill him and his girlfriend Kristen Stewart a lot, I mean, seriously, a LOT, and I won't tell you exactly how it ends, but it becomes clear enough early on that this is not the kind of movie where the good guys die, or even lose, at the end.
