Film Review: “American Ultra” and “Mistress America”
"American Ultra" isn't as funny as it should be, while "Mistress America" is much funnier than it probably deserves.
American Ultra is a stoner comedy, except when it isn’t. Sometimes, it’s all about indulgent hyper-violence. It’s also a spy movie. Kristen Stewart frowns a few times in early scenes, then kisses Jesse Eisenberg in later scenes, so an off-key romance could be hiding somewhere in here, too.
This grab-bag wouldn’t have been such a bad thing if American Ultra (
) director Nima Nourizadeh hadn’t zig-zagged between each without much reason. Nourizadeh needed to find a tone twice as dark — I’m talking pitch-black humor — or half as cynical. Instead, he landed somewhere in the middle, never fully committed one way or another, so the movie’s early, promising foundation crumbles. It’s too preoccupied to be funny.
American Ultra begins at the end, with a man named Mike Howell (Eisenberg) shackled to a chair in an interrogation room. He starts to tell his story from the beginning. The movie races through a rewound montage of his memories — a compressed version of American Ultra itself, played backwards — until finally arriving at that starting point, in the small town of Liman, West Virginia, where Mike lives with his girlfriend Phoebe (Stewart), jockeying a cash register at the local “Cash ‘n’ Carry” convenience store. He is a deadbeat. A nervous, sweaty, anxious, blazed-out deadbeat.
Meanwhile, at the CIA’s headquarters, Agent Victoria Lasseter (Connie Britton) learns that her nemesis within the Agency, Adrian Yates (Topher Grace), plans to kill the last surviving member of a secret government operation known as “Wise Guys.” (Yes, it’s as ridiculous on screen as it is in words.) Mike is that Wise Guy. He’s a killing machine, trained by the CIA to turn almost any item into a weapon — but he doesn’t know it. Lasseter hustles out to Liman, attempts to “activate” Mike, but his subconscious is caught in a fog of marijuana. It’s only after he’s ambushed by a pair of assassins — he kills them in mere seconds, with a spoon and a cup of instant noodles — that he realizes that something is very, very wrong.
American Ultra is at its strongest in the aftermath of that revelation. The first act almost exclusively focuses on Mike and Phoebe’s relationship, so his frantic, post-mortem call to her shakes with possibilities. How much does Phoebe know about Mike’s past? How can he reconcile the person he thinks he is with the person he used to be? And how, exactly, could he puncture a man’s windpipe with a spoon?
Eisenberg and Stewart are terrific romantic partners, as previously shown in 2009’s Adventureland, and share impeccable comedic timing. It’s enough to wish that American Ultra bailed on the lion’s share of its strained premise — the CIA, the MacGyverish weapons, the whole “Wise Guy” thing — and just let these two hang out on a couch more. Nourizadeh’s deliberately gratuitous action sequences get the spotlight in American Ultra, but together, Eisenberg and Stewart could outshine even the most ridiculous utensil-assisted murder.
DIRECTOR NOAH BAUMBACH’S latest collaboration with Greta Gerwig is much funnier than it probably deserves to be. Mistress America (), which the two wrote together, inverts a familiar coming-of-age trope into the rarest of summer movie delights: a small, lovely movie about family.
Mistress America follows Tracy (Lola Kirke) during her first semester as a freshman at Barnard College in Manhattan. She struggles to find a comfortable place on campus — despite her writerly ambitions, she’s rejected from an elite literary society — while nursing a crush on her only friend, a pretentious freshman named Tony (Matthew Shear). Her mother is due to marry in Thanksgiving, and on a whim, Tracy calls her sister-to-be, Brooke (Gerwig), a thirtysomething gadfly with endless plans for the future. Brooke takes her out on the town, a night stuffed with live music and chic parties and stylish, semi-illegal studio apartments. Just like that, Tracy is hooked. She idolizes Brooke. But should she?
Baumbach and Gerwig wade into screwball comedy in Mistress America — given their offbeat style, it wouldn’t be wrong to call it oddball — and the rapid-fire dialogue fits snugly within these stories of stunted adulthood. Punchlines land like meteor showers, zinging and burning in waves from character to character, until everybody must pause and catch a breath. It’s a remarkably quotable movie, one of the funniest I’ve seen this year.
Mistress America succeeds, though, because of the depth and purpose given to Tracy and Brooke. As they carve out their relationship, they say and do hurtful things to each other. It’s an honest depiction of what happens when you become close with someone at a vulnerable age. Kirke plays the kid sister role especially well, transforming her wide-eyed awe into appreciative savviness with terrific subtleties. Gerwig is lithe and energetic in all her great usual ways, of course. Brooke bounces into obstacles with a naivety that’s nearly admirable. They need each other, but neither is mature enough to give exactly what she should. That’s why they’re such intriguing characters. They’re learning how to be sisters.
American Ultra is rated R and runs 97 minutes. Mistress America is rated R and runs 86 minutes. Both open Friday in area theaters.
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