American Ultra

American Ultra

If you think about it, “American Ultra” is a weird combination of a cute slacker love story and a glossy ultra-violent action movie. And it does feel weird.

But mixing genres like this takes a different level of skill than Nima Nourizadeh, who directed the found-footage high school pukefest “Project X,” brings to the table. Yes, “American Ultra” has better production values than that first film then again, so does your average wedding video but it’s just as heavy-handed. However, Max Landis’ script (“Chronicle”) begins with all of the grungy, morose trappings of your typical small-town indie drama.

Jesse Eisenberg stars as Mike Howell, a long-haired stoner who works at an epically run-down convenience store in remote and desolate West Virginia. All he wants out of life is to marry his girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart), a bail bondsman with whom he shares a bong and a home and, hopefully, eternity. Mike knows he doesn’t deserve her (and for awhile it’s hard to argue with that; there’s not much to him) and one of the few recurring bits of charm involves his inability to find just the right moment to pop the question.

Then one night at work, some weird lady comes up to his checkout counter speaking some gibberish while buying a cup of soup and walks out. Suddenly he finds himself able to kill two bad guys coming at him in the parking lot swiftly! with the spoon from said soup that said lady left behind. As it turns out, Mike is an assassin from an abandoned government program awakened by CIA agent Victoria Lasseter (Connie Britton) in an effort to keep him alive.

And now it makes sense why “American Ultra” is set in Liman, W.Va., perhaps an homage to Doug Liman’s “The Bourne Identity” with some druggy nuggets of one of the director’s earliest films, “Go.” Like amnesiac Jason Bourne, Mike is a killing machine and he never knew it, piecing together in his mind the lethal skills and high-tech knowledge he never knew he had.

This could put a real wrench in his engagement plans. Or will it? “American Ultra” strives to keep up its early, yearning feeling of two young, desperate lovers, even as the dangerous situations and gory action sequences become more extreme and elaborate. Eisenberg and Stewart, who starred together in the 2009 dramedy “Adventureland,” share an easy, lived-in chemistry with each other that only grows stronger as the stakes get higher though it’s hard to buy Eisenberg as a character who lacks smarts or ambition. He’s at his best when he’s playing the smartest person in the room, as he has in films like “The Squid and the Whale” and “The Social Network.”

Also underused is a parade of supporting players stuck frustratingly in one-note roles. Britton brings class and smarts to her part as a veteran agent who goes rogue for the greater good, but Topher Grace is relentlessly snarling and sniveling as her much younger superior officer who’s only looking out for himself. John Leguizamo grates on us as a tattooed, trash-talking drug dealer.

Tony Hale does little more than be meek and subservient as Britton’s longtime colleague. Walton Goggins’ arsonist-turned-operative Laugher has one genuine moment of connection with Eisenberg but is mostly just maniacal. And then Bill Pullman shows up for maybe two minutes tops as everybody’s shadowy big boss.

But here’s the thing: All their efforts to kill Mike or keep him alive culminating in a wildly bloody and explosive conclusion inside a discount superstore, which contains a few clever ideas seem rather beside the point. We know from the beginning that Mike is going to be OK.

The whole movie is told in flashback form while he sits chained to an interrogation table battered and sliced-up but otherwise unharmed, which saps the whole thing of any true suspense. Maybe the hope is that you’ll be in an altered state yourself by the time you see it, and you will have forgotten about all that stuff at the beginning.

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