One stoner’s life changes for the extreme in ‘American Ultra’. The film stars Jesse Eisenberg as Mike, a worrisome and unmotivated stoner whose small town life with his live-in girlfriend, Phoebe (Stewart), is suddenly turned upside down. Unknown to him, Mike is actually a highly trained, lethal sleeper agent. In the blink of an eye, as his secret past comes back to haunt him, Mike is thrust into the middle of a deadly government operation and is forced to summon his inner deadly skills to survive. There’s not much to note positively about writer Max Landis’s (Chronicle) latest script. It’s every bit as lazy and dull as it’s main protagonist. When i saw the trailer to this movie, i thought there would be a lot more stoner comedy in the film. What i didn’t know is that the trailer features every comedic line in the movie. I didn’t laugh during any of it, because i have heard these lines hundreds of times with the oversaturation of this trailer in movies i have seen over the last six months. Because of this, the film is 90% action adrenaline stuffed, and 10% cheap comedy, and both of these just don’t mix well together, because of the uneven concoction. The film has some really well shot and well choreographed fight scenes, but the biggest problem is that they don’t seem believable with the wrong actors cast for the role. I get that Eisenberg and Stewart were cast to get across that lazy stoner vibe, but it makes it tough for me to conjure that they could literally outmuscle someone, despite Eisenberg being a science project. He is still built like a scrawny wimp, so it does take me out of the movie when he single handedly takes out twelve men in the span of a couple minutes. Even with intense action, it’s few and far between as a slave to the overabundance of snails movement pacing that the film is riddled in. It’s all very uninteresting and doesn’t have enough to fill 86 minutes of screen time. It was nice to see Bill Pullman again, as he is great in his small role. I wish the movie featured more of him and less of the laughable obnoxious Topher Grace, cast as yet another overacting villain. He just isn’t big enough of an obstacle as a villain in films like ‘Predators’ or ‘Spider-Man 3’, so why did they think it would work casting him as the leader of the deadliest task force on the planet? The ending couldn’t come fast enough, but the problem is that there is three different ones to get through before the anti-climatic final line of the film is spoken. This movie never needed one false ending, let alone two. These closing scenes serve as a solid metaphor for the dialogue uttered by Eisenberg in the film. It’s muted in tone, annoying in repetition, and doesn’t quite know when to stop quick enough to leave the audience with somewhat of a nice taste in the mouth. ‘American Ultra’ is a losing effort on all fronts. Not believable enough to pack this kind of action, and not nearly funny enough to find it’s place in the stoner comedy hall of fame with such greats as ‘Half Baked’ or ‘Pinapple Express’. It feels like this movie tried to be too much like the latter, but it can’t even compete with the charm or the stoner dedication of Seth Rogen and James Franco. The film made me want to get stoned. Not with marijuana, but with a bunch of people hurling rocks at my face.

3/10