Ultra Dope

Speaking of movies we saw previews for. we saw a preview for American Ultra (2015) before the last stupid action movie we watched. I knew about the movie, but had it pegged as a sort of Natural Born Killers. But the "Ultra" isn't for "ultra-violence", it's for "MK-Ultra".

Jesse Eisenberg is a night clerk at a 24-hour convenience store in West Virginia. He likes getting high and drawing stories about an ape astronaut. He loves his girlfriend, Kristen Stewart, and plans to propose to her in Hawaii. But his phobia about leaving town is too strong and they have to abandon their travel plans at the airport. But K-Stew still loves and forgives him.

Meanwhile, CIA agent Connie Britton gets an encrypted message that codename Wiseman is being eliminated by the agent who supplanted her, Topher Grace. So she travels to West Virginia, walks into Eisenberg's shop, buys some cup noodles and recites the activation code to him. He is nonplussed and so is she - nothing happens. So she walks out without her noodles. 

As Jesse is heating up the noodles, he notices some guys messing with his car. When he goes out to tell them to stop, they attack him. So he kills them with the noodles and a plastic spoon. Then screams.

This is sort of the best part - Eisenberg freaking out when he went Jason Bourne on a group of assassins and calling his girlfriend because he needs someone to talk him down. This is definitely a Jesse Eisenberg strength. 

So obviously, they spend a lot of the rest of the movie being stalked by assassins, freaking out and then Eisenberg killing them in improbable ways. I'll drop two spoilers - one is that Stewart was Eisenberg's handler, but fell in love with him and quit to stick with him. The other is that they come out on top.

I liked the idea of "stoned Bourne". Also, John Leguizamo as Eisenberg's dealer and friend was a lot of fun. Stewart's role was the hardest, I think - the "girlfriend" role. It's tough to figure out what she sees in him, although we do see her getting high a couple of times, and she likes to hear him talking about the ape astronaut. That she was his handler and knew him before he was amnesiated helps make it make sense. But I feel like I knew plenty of stoner girls, many of whom loved stoner boys - but you rarely see it done believably in movies. Oh well, it's pretty rare to see a convincing girlfriend in a movie - so many are written by men.

Anyway, this was a lot of fun - excitement and laughs. I don't know if it was as deep as they were going for, though. There's some funny stuff after Jesse finds out about who he is and wonders if he's actually a robot. But they didn't really do much with this. I don't care - maybe they didn't either.