“American Ultra” is “Cheech & Chong’s The Bourne Identity,” a mash up of genres and genre tropes, slammed together in a way that feels like an early draft of a screenplay that ultimately needs to be expanded and finished. It seems as if the filmmakers behind this thing thought that simply taking the “sleeper agent” government-trained killer storyline that we’ve seen a lot and adding a bit of marijuana use to the proceedings would somehow magically result in a movie worth watching, and while “American Ultra” isn’t bad, it never rises to the heights promised by the marketing and the concept.

Mike (Jesse Eisenberg) is a heavy marijuana user, often derisively referred to as a “stoner,” and he lives a simple, fairly shitty life in a small Virginia town where he gets harassed by the police and seems to be the only employee at an incredibly shitty convenience store. The only thing making his life bearable (besides the weed) is his live-in girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) and he is planning to propose to her, except that his can’t really get his shit together long enough to do so. Meanwhile, over at CIA headquarters not too far away, an agent (Connie Britton) finds out that her government trained super killer in hiding is about to be killed by a rival agent’s (Topher Grace) own super killer program, so she goes to Mike and “activates” him with a pass code. From that point forward, whenever someone tries to do anything to Mike, he knows how to get out of the problem and also knows how to kill people with whatever is on hand. The rest of the movie is the CIA trying to kill Mike and Mike trying to survive with Phoebe.Continue Reading …