American Ultra (2015)

Waste of time

Absolutely the worst movie.

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

I mean, I was expecting waaaaay more jokes. And there are quite enough, but still it wasn't the focus. Of the ones that are there, the majority are well acted and funny. No lazy BS ad lib. Actual jokes.But the movie is actually a well writen, focused story, with "emotions" (not reeeeeally, but at least motivations for all the characters) and a lot of CGI blood (plus some "real" blood too here and there).It's good, its smart. But I could've used a bit more of funny and a little less of narrative sense. For my taste. The performances are optimal.

It was ok. Kinda weird, kinda lame. Topher grace was a bad bad guy

Shoddy script writing has ruined an interesting concept proving once again that Max Landis is only an idea man.Some (not a lot) of good acting and albeit great action cannot save this snooze-fest which had me rolling my eyes in frustration. This isn't second-degree B movie magic, this is just lame dialog, bad directing and acting choices and frustratingly lack-luster dialog. I give it four stars because of one or two rare moments of interest.

Stoner and slacker Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg) spends his days getting high and writing comic books, but what he doesn't realise is that he is actually a sleeper agent who was part of an experiment by the CIA. When Howell is targeted for elimination by the CIA, his handler Victoria Lasseter (Connie Britton) decides to 'activate' him much to the annoyance of her colleague Adrian Yates (Topher Grace). With the CIA and their top agents hunting him down, Howell must use all of his skills to the best of his ability in order to survive...American Ultra is a mishmash of films with elements of The Manchurian Candidate, The Bourne films and practically every stoner comedy in existence. With the right handling this could have been great, but it's all rather ho-hum to be honest...I'm not generally a huge fan of stoner type comedies because often they are rather lazy and repetitive (there are some exceptions such as Harold and Kumar), and in this respect American Ultra is fairly weak as well. The stoner dialogue between Eisenberg and Stewart is lazy and uninspired and pretty dull - there's only so many times that you can hear words 'Dude' and 'Man' in the same sentence before it starts to become irritating. I presume the stoner aspect of Howell's life is the 'comedy' aspect of the film, but to me none of it was funny and as I mentioned it was more annoying than anything.Even taking out all of the lame stoner dialogue and focus on the story itself then the film still isn't that great; for a start I found that a lot of things here weren't very well explained or didn't make much sense. For example Howell is a sleeper agent and the CIA have targeted him for elimination and this seems to be based on the fact that Howell wants to leave the area?? Now presumably the reason for this is that the CIA may be worried about losing him or perhaps they want to keep an eye on him in case he somehow regains his memory (this is all speculation as nothing is really explained). I just didn't understand why he needed to be killed? Even if he moved out of the area, what difference would it make to the CIA as Howell didn't know he was part of an experiment nor did he know anything about his past life. Alternatively, if they wanted Howell to remain in the area why not put a directive or program in place to suppress his desire to leave? I know I'm throwing up a lot of scenarios and problems, but when a narrative is as vague as this one it feels as though you have to work everything out for yourself...Still it isn't all bad Eisenberg and Stewart make a likable enough couple (even though the former is annoying and is basically the same as he is in every film). Stewart on the other hand is much better; her performance is more natural and believable and she does give the picture a slight lift - also to her credit she didn't annoy me anywhere near as much as Eisenberg. The supporting cast are all OK, but I can't imagine that this film will really be the high point of anyone's career. That said though, some of the action sequences are pretty good and the film has just about enough energy to make it watchable, but when the chips are down there aren't enough funny moments for the 'comedy' aspect of the film to work and the narrative is a little vague and isn't interesting enough to make it a particularly involving experience. It passes the time, but that's about it.