The above expression was exactly what I thought of when I finished watching the 2015 box-office flop American Ultra. Did the film deserve such a cruel fate? Was it as good as its trailer (at least to me) suggested it could be?
The answer to the above questions isn’t quite as black and white as one would think.
To begin, the above trailer does a good job telling you American Ultra’s basic plot. You have a stoner named Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg, pretty good in the role) and his girlfriend Phoebe Larson (Kristen Stewart, also quite good) who live in a small, dead-end town and smoke pot and work in their dead end jobs. When we first meet them, Mike wants to take Phoebe to Hawaii and surprise her with a marriage proposal. But at the airport he has a panic attack and is unable to leave the town. It turns out he’s had many of these panic attacks before and they keep him in this town.
Meanwhile, over in Washington D.C., an agent named Victoria Lasseter (Connie Britton, yet another actor doing good work) is tipped off that her subject, Mike Howell (natch) and the entire operation he was a part of is about to be shut down. And by shut down we mean “killed”.
Lasseter confronts a fellow agent, the young and obnoxious Adrian Yates (Topher Grace, providing another great acting turn), and he admits he has initiated the shut down of Lasseter’s old project and that Mike Howell will be dead before the day is out. Lasseter, however, does an end around the obnoxious agent and shows up at Howell’s small town and, shown partially in the clip above, tries to “active” him so that he will be able to defend himself.
What follows is plenty of action, blood, and, especially with Mike Howell’s character, confusion as this mellow stoner finds he is suddenly a killing machine. The body count rises as Yates seals the town off, intent on killing not only Howell but also Lasseter, whom he instantly knows has activated this agent.
Sounds good, right?
Well…
Ok, I started this review by posting the “neither fish nor fowl” quote. The quote refers to something that either isn’t easily categorized or something that does not rightly belong or fit well in a given group or situation.
That later definition, in a nutshell, is what keeps American Ultra from rising up from a “good” film to being a truly “great” film.
Mind you, I like the four main actors. I like the situation/story created by screenwriter Max Landis. Further, I can understand his twitter expressed frustration when the film was released and didn’t make much money at the box office. Clearly there was great thought placed in this screenplay and, frankly, the movie should have done better than it did and one hopes it can do so in the video market.
Having said that, the film unfortunately does have flaws. To begin, there are plot elements that make you scratch your head. I don’t want to give away SPOILERS, so I’ll leave some of those elements from this discussion, but suffice to say when you learn of certain characters’ identities you think maybe there was an easier way of giving Howell a head’s up and/or sprinting him to safety. Also, agent Lasseter makes it to Howell’s town in record time, no?
Worse, unfortunately, is that as humorous as the film is at times, it is never really a “laugh out loud” funny-type work. It felt as thought the movie’s creators were trying hard to clean things up and they did this a little too well. These stoners -and their friends- are never as grubby as they could have been (see Cheech and Chong). Also, the action/killings presented are never as graphic as they could have been. Rather than bouncing between extremes -laughs versus gore- the film tries to create an even keel and sometimes being middle of the road is not where you want to be with comedy or action.
Having said all that, American Ultra is, nonetheless, an at times clever and humorous film with good to great acting, sympathetic leads and hissable villains. Perhaps its box office problems were more a result of when it was released, the competition it faced, and how it was marketed more than anything else.
In the end, I would recommend the film but note that while a decent bit of entertainment, I left feeling it could -and should- have been even better.
*****
POSTSCRIPT: Getting back to screenwriter Max Landis, he also received quite a bit of negative attention, again because of his twitter writings, regarding his view that the character of Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens was a “Mary Sue”.
Not having seen The Force Awakens, I can’t comment on that particular opinion, but I will say this: Mr. Landis created a very interesting character in Phoebe Larson (the Kristen Stewart character) in American Ultra but then he just went and made her a typical “damsel in distress” with the movie’s climax.
Mr. Landis: You may well be right regarding the character of Rey in The Force Awakens, and it appears to me you have passion regarding storytelling and an awareness of cliches. Unfortunately, you fell for one here and, in a movie that could have been better in many ways, the damsel in distress role the character of Phoebe eventually takes is one of the film’s most egregious errors.
Had you recognized that cliche, I’m certain you could have turned it on its ear and made something more with her.
Hell, not only could you have, you should have!