American Ultra (2015)

American Ultra arrived in 2015 with a premise that reads like a pitch meeting held in a hot car: a small-town stoner discovers he is a CIA sleeper agent and kills people with household objects. Max Landis wrote it, Nima Nourizadeh directed it, and Lionsgate released it into a late-August marketplace that had already decided its fate. The film is many things. A political document it is not.

The story gestures at MKUltra, that durable well of American paranoia, but treats it as a plot engine instead of a thesis. There is no argument here about state power, no sermon about the military-industrial complex. The CIA of this film is a workplace full of petty rivals, and the violence stays cartoonish enough to keep the proceedings weightless.

For the purposes of classification, the relevant material is thin and scattered. Kristen Stewart's Phoebe turns out to be a capable handler, and Connie Britton's Lasseter holds senior rank, though neither development is offered as a statement about anything. Supporting players of various backgrounds drift through the margins without the film pausing to remark on them. Mike's panic attacks function as a lock on the town, a mechanism to keep him contained, not as an exploration of how a mind actually works. The film has other business.

Which is to say it wants to be three things at once: a stoner comedy, an action movie, and a romance. It manages none of them cleanly. Critics were split, audiences shrugged, and the box office was unkind. The film now sits as a curious artifact from a moment when original mid-budget genre pictures could still get made and then quietly vanish. A sequel was planned. It was not made. The whole enterprise is an entertainment with no ambitions beyond its own premise, and on that modest front it mostly delivers, if the mood is right.