Amer­i­can Ultra

Amer­i­can Ultra is a film about locat­ing the right moment to take your life to the next lev­el, to fur­ther a rela­tion­ship, to entrench your matu­ri­ty, to let the world know that you’re ready to take on every­thing it’s got for you.

It is the sto­ry of Jesse Eisenberg’s Mike, a lank-haired ston­er screw-up à la Jeff Spi­coli work­ing day shifts at a road­side mini mart in the town of Liman, West Vir­ginia, a patch of cul­tur­al scorched earth which offers noth­ing to do and nowhere to go. He resides with his lank-haired beau, Phoebe, who is beau­ti­ful­ly played by Kris­ten Stew­art. She is the brains of the out­fit, aware but accept­ing of both Mike’s blun­der­ing ways and his bizarre melt­downs which occur when­ev­er he tries to leave Liman.

Mike goes about his life with a two-bit wed­ding ring stashed in the pock­et of his skin­ny jeans, wait­ing for that per­fect moment to pop the ques­tion to Phoebe. This film is the sto­ry of how Mike sum­mons up those spe­cial words from deep down in his gut, a tumul­tuous 24-hour peri­od of frol­ics, fire­works and fisticuffs where the pair learn a lot about one anoth­er, and not all of it positive.

Aside from mild domes­tic spats, the armour-plat­ed ele­phant in the room is the fact that Mike is, in fact, a depro­grammed CIA super assas­sin (stay with this…) who has ran­dom­ly made it to the top of someone’s shit list. The only way he can sur­vive immi­nent death is if his ex-min­der comes and re-pro­grammes him so he can defend him­self against the grenades, gas attacks and drone strikes.

Direc­tor Nima Nour­izadeh, the evil soul behind 2012 film mau­dit, Project X, plays lark­ish, com­ic book mate­r­i­al as straight as a poi­soned, flam­ing arrow. Cli­mac­tic coda aside, both Eisen­berg and Stew­art play the film as a roman­tic melo­dra­ma, and even in scenes of func­tion­al expo­si­tion, there’s a sin­cer­i­ty that’s pal­pa­bly present, if not always vis­i­ble. Some have com­pared the film to The Bourne Iden­ti­ty meets Still Smokin’, but a clos­er touch­stone would be Hitchcock’s ​’50s chase come­dies such as The Man Who Knew Too Much and North By Northwest.

Yet this is no fam­i­ly movie, as Nour­izadeh and screen­writer Max Lan­dis mesh togeth­er scenes of win­some pup­py love and twen­tysome­thing intro­spec­tion with claw-ham­mer exe­cu­tions and close-quar­ters shot­gun blasts to the chest. The ultra­vi­o­lence is played in quote marks, aware of its own glossy absur­di­ty par­tic­u­lar­ly in the sequence where an ticked-off Mike prances around a depart­ment store and dis­patch­es goons with any­thing that comes to hand (tin cans, frozen ham­burg­ers, etc).

Though grim vio­lence and abject behav­iour are cen­tral to Amer­i­can Ultra, Nour­izadeh is clear­ly on the side of love, and as such he wants to make a beau­ti­ful, roman­tic film about a young cou­ple over­com­ing a tough time in their rela­tion­ship. The film’s best shot – and there are rather a few con­tenders for the title – sees Mike and Phoebe simul­ta­ne­ous­ly tasered by the police. The cam­era switch­es from a frontal eye-lev­el view to a shot from above, and we see their comatose bod­ies flopped to the floor, the wires con­nect­ed to the taser darts cre­at­ing a giant cross/​kiss on the floor. And it’s heartbreaking.