American Ultra

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.

Between this beginning and this end, we find an oddly sweet love story that includes the best marriage proposal I've ever seen in a movie, some neat-o and surprisingly thematically appropriate comic book art, and a lot of lovely action choreography that involves the use, as weapons, of many interesting objects, one or two of which you have probably never seen used as a weapon in a movie before. And the list of objects that have never been used as a weapon in a movie is a short list indeed.

As an aside, American Ultra is intriguingly full of unflattering closeups of attractive actors. Too many movies want to show us pretty people being pretty. Even if a character has been shot at and beaten up while running through the woods, they usually seem to make it through the ordeal looking relatively fresh and appealing. Not in this movie. Most of these actors spend most of this movie absolutely looking like shit, and the effect is really interesting. Looking at their exhausted, dirty, puffy faces framed by greasy and lifeless hair, you're constantly reminded that these people have been through a lot, and recently.

So should you go see this movie? Yeah, if you don't mind a bit of ultra-violence. Be prepared to watch terrible things happen to people's bodies, frequently, and don't expect the editing to tastefully cut away at the last minute. American Ultra is darker and sadder than its advertising package makes it look, but it earns that darkness and sadness, it is sometimes quirky and sweet in surprising ways, and it won't waste your time. I won't tell you how it ends, but it leaves itself open for a sequel. They probably won't make one, but if they did, I would go see ten of them.


*Jesse Eisenberg's character is not named Jesse Eisenberg, nor is Kristin Stewart's character named Kristen Stewart. However, I have a hell of a time remembering the names of fictional characters, and you may not have seen the movie yet, so I'm just going to refer to the actors by name. If you haven't seen the movie yet, you have no idea who Mike Howell is, and he's not a real person anyway, and you may well be familiar with Jesse Eisenberg from other fine films in which he appears, and you may be familiar with Kristen Stewart from those shitty sparkle-vampire movies** she was in, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time juggling the names of actors and characters and making you learn who is who just so we can both make it through this six-paragraph review of a late summer action movie.

**Yes, I did just take the obligatory cheap shot at Twilight. Two things: first of all, I'm typing this on the lovely sexy new iMac that my boyfriend bought earlier today, and I have no idea how to make that little secondary asterisk character that's shaped like a dagger***, so I'll just have to be content with two asterisks. Secondly, I have a theory that, while I did not personally enjoy the Twilight films, or even watch them all, the abuse of these films in popular culture as a sort of all-purpose punching bag has a nasty, unacknowledged vein of sexism running through it. Bear with me here. Arguably, the Twilight movies are the very flimsiest of cultural junk food, catering to the worst, most mopey teenage inclinations, but I think that we pile onto them especially hard because they're cultural junk food for girls. Equivalent teenage-boy cultural junk food movies, with their pointless jocky douchebaggery, badly timed explosions, and thinly written female characters, often seem to pass. I mean even if the movie is so teen-boy-shitty that you walk out of the theater LITERALLY SMELLING LIKE AXE BODY SPRAY, the movie gets an indulgent smile, and then is forgotten. But the Twilight movies finished sucking their way into and out of theaters three years ago and here I am, still exploiting how dumb they were for a cheap punchline in a footnote. Shame on me.

***I just learned from Wikipedia that the little dagger shaped thing is in fact called a dagger, although interestingly for fans of a certain popular series of French comic books, it is also known as an obelisk. Also, the word "asterisk" comes from the Greek "asterikos," which means "little star." On a final note, I can now include an obelisk, or dagger, in this piece of writing by copying and pasting it from Wikipedia: †. This means that I could go back and replace my double asterisk with an obelisk, and the triple asterisk with a double asterisk, but really, at this point, fuck it.