Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Topher Grace, Connie Britton, Walton Goggins, John Leguizamo

Nima Nourizadeh

After making his directorial debut with the totally distasteful and juvenile found footage comedy, “Project X,” it wouldn’t have been surprising if Nima Nourizadeh never worked in Hollywood again. But someone clearly saw something in the filmmaker that warranted giving him another chance, and while he doesn’t exactly redeem himself with the action-comedy “American Ultra,” it does prove that he’s at least somewhat competent behind the camera. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement, and deservedly so, because although the movie boasts a talented cast and intriguing premise, it never amounts to more than a mildly amusing end-of-summer distraction that squanders its considerable potential under the indecisive direction of Nourizadeh.

Jesse Eisenberg stars as Mike Howell, an unambitious stoner who’s perfectly content with his mundane life in West Virginia alongside his live-in girlfriend, Phoebe (Kristen Stewart). Mike is completely in love with her, and even plans a romantic getaway to trip in order to propose, but for some reason, he keeps having panic attacks that prevent him from leaving town. Unbeknownst to him, his crippling anxiety is actually a side effect from an experimental government program he volunteered for that wiped his memory and turned him into a CIA sleeper agent. When the program’s architect, Victoria Lasseter (Connie Britton), learns that bureaucratic brownnoser Adrian Yates (Topher Grace) plans to terminate all the subjects from the abandoned project, she decides to activate Mike using a secret code phrase and give him a fair shot at survival. But it doesn’t work as expected – that is, until Yates sends a pair of assassins to kill Mike and he snaps out of his daze, dispatching them with only a spoon and a cup of ramen. Marked for death and forced to go on the run, Mike must utilize his new abilities to rescue Phoebe when she’s kidnapped by Yates and his team of programmed killers.

Read the rest of this entry »