Movie Review Monday: American Ultra
Welcome to another edition of Movie Review Monday!
This week's film is the 2015 action movie, American Ultra, starring Jesse Eisenburg and Kristen Stewart.
I'm going to put this out there at the outset here, I was very misled as to what this movie was going to be. I thought it was a spoof of Bourne Identity based on the trailers that came out, but it was not anywhere close to that. While it had some funny moments, it was more straightforward than I was hoping for. It wasn't a bad movie overall, I just felt like it is something different that the studio didn't really know what to do with or how to best market it.
The premise is that a stoner, Mike (Eisenburg), finds out his is a actually a secret agent after the government comes to kill him and his training is activated. His girlfriend, Phoebe (Stewart) works to help him figure everything out and fight back.
The action is pretty good in this movie, and it has some funny beats like I said. The whole package is entertaining enough but it feels like a sort of half baked (pun intended) idea. It isn't enough of a comedy or enough of a spy movie or enough of an action movie to satisfy any of those cravings. In the end, it's a sort of average, forgettable movie that while it didn't feel like an entire waste of time, I wouldn't have been upset if I missed it in hindsight.
I caught American Ultra streaming on Hulu, and you can check it out there too if you so choose, but it isn't all that I hoped it would be.