You know you’re in for a rough evening when you kill someone with a spoon.
It was an accident. Mostly. It’s not like Mike Howell is a practiced flatware assassin—or, at least, not that he remembers. For the last few years, Mike and his girlfriend, Phoebe, have spent their days smoking weed and scarfing popcorn and getting the occasional tattoo. Sure, they nearly took a trip to Hawaii together, but Mike’s panic attack ended that little dream and made sure they stayed firmly in their rut.
It’s doubtful that the town of Liman, W.Va., even offers assassin cooking classes. Not that Mike could take them anyway—what with his high-pressure job and all. Why, even on the night of the silverware mishap, Mike was toiling away at the local convenience store, doodling out elaborate cartoons and occasionally helping himself to some instant ramen.
But then something weird happened.
Someone came in.
Yeah, crazy, right? No one ever visits this particular convenience store. Then, even more mysteriously, the visitor grabs stuff off the shelves! And she puts it on the counter as if she’s going to buy it!
But instead of plopping down a few bucks or a credit card or any other barter-worthy items, she begins talking gibberish—perfectly intelligible words strung together in an utterly meaningless pattern (much like, my editor might say, this review). She repeats the same “sentence” several times, then apologizes and leaves—not even bothering to take her milk with her.
Like I said: weird. And then something even stranger happens: Mike sees a couple of guys fiddling with the wheels on his car. When he walks outside and tells them to stop—carrying with him a Styrofoam cup of instant ramen and a spoon—they both whip out guns.
Fifteen seconds later, those dudes are lying dead on the ground—bearing wounds from their own weapons, the instant ramen and, of course, the spoon. Mike stands above them, dinnerless and spoonless, wondering what just happened.
Perhaps there’s just one rational explanation.
“There’s a chance I might be a robot,” he says.
For better or worse, Mike is not a robot. But he is the most secret of secret agents—one so secret that even he doesn’t know it. But because he was part of a mostly failed CIA experiment, he’s now a liability. And at least one suited spook plans to secretly terminate Mike’s secret status permanently.
This is not positive, of course. But it does allow several people opportunity to do the right thing. Victoria Lasseter—the gibberish-speaking woman from the convenience store—she risks both life and livelihood trying to save the guy. Petey, Lasseter’s old assistant, also puts his career on the line to prevent a humanity-squelching catastrophe. And, naturally, Mike and Phoebe repeatedly rescue each other from terrible situations. The two lovebirds clearly care for each other, and Mike—wanting them to be together for the rest of their (potentially short) lives, even works in a marriage proposal.
It’s pretty obvious Phoebe has given up a lot for Mike—putting up with his panic attacks and clueless behavior and just plain aimlessness. But we later learn that she has sacrificed even more than Mike suspects.
Mike and Phoebe live together. In flashback we see, from Mike’s perspective, an interlude with Phoebe. He and we see her from the shoulders up while they are sexually engaged. The two also kiss and cuddle.
It’s suggested that Petey is gay. In trying to apprehend Lasseter, the CIA concocts a cover story involving her alleged “inappropriate contact” with monkeys. Mike’s friend/drug dealer, a guy named Rose, has adorned his basement with paintings of bare-breasted women. There’s a reference to oral sex. Mike and Rose meet outside a strip club. After making an illicit exchange, Rose asks Mike whether he’d like to go inside and do acid. Mike says he’d rather not, it being 8 a.m. and all.
It’s not just spoons Mike utilizes for killing purposes. Indeed, he uses a variety of household wares. He garrotes one man with a metal dustpan. He chops through the forehead of another with a meat cleaver. He clubs a guy’s thigh with the claw of a hammer, shortly after his assailants stabs through Mike’s hand with a screwdriver. He rakes still another through a bevy of lightbulbs. A frying pan plays a role in one shooting, with the bullet entering and exiting a man’s chest with a splash of blood. Mike tells Phoebe that when he stabbed the man with the spoon, the guy’s lungs exploded.
Audiences don’t see any lungs go boom—but everything else is on gratuitous and gory display. More than 20 people die during the course of American Ultra, and most do so in pretty horrible ways.
Rose and his two friends are killed with shotgun blasts, and all three deaths are shown in excruciating detail, one in slow-motion. Other people are also mowed down, or disabled by way of fireworks, or nearly choked to death with an electrical cord, or blown up in a car soaked with gasoline, or almost killed by poisonous fumes, or injured from falling through a ceiling. People get Tazed. Someone knocks out someone else’s teeth with a pair of handcuffs. A man brutally beats a woman, leaving her face a bloody, torn-up mess.
We’re then subjected to a bloody animated short during the credits, wherein Mike’s cartoonish creation (and in this scenario, his alter ego) kills a number of bad guys in grotesque ways. We see decapitations, flying organs and at least one brain crawling along the bottom of the screen.
Just about 100 f-words and 30 s-words. A voluminous amount of other foul exclamations include “a–,” “b–ch,” “h—,” “t-tty” and “p—.” The n-word is thrown around. God’s name is misused five or six times, once with “d–n.” Obscene gestures are made at least three times.
Toking marijuana is perhaps Mike’s and Phoebe’s favorite pastime, so we see a lot of it here. Mike mentions that his car is loaded with pot and mushrooms (explaining his reticence to call the police after he kills those two guys messing with his wheels). Lasseter tells Mike that she brought him in to this special spy program after he was arrested for dropping LSD. Rose snorts cocaine.
Rose also sells illegal fireworks. Mike vomits (a lot) after being subjected to poisonous gas, and he’s shown retching into a toilet during a panic attack.
Before things get too crazy in American Ultra, Phoebe and Mike are hanging out on Mike’s car hood, looking down on an accident scene in the street below, where a car ran into a tree. Mike gets pretty emotional at the sight. He talks about how beautiful and free the car must’ve been before its trajectory was so rudely interrupted by the tree. He seems on the verge of tears.
“Am I the tree?” he asks Phoebe. He wonders whether he wrecked her life and won’t let her move on.
It’s a fairly introspective moment in a movie purposefully lacking them. For the most part, American Ultra is a silly, schlocky, salacious study in excess—excess blood, excess drug use, excess obscenity. I guess that shouldn’t surprise me since it’s helmed by Nima Nourizadeh, the same guy who directed one of my least favorite movies of all time, Project X.
This bizarre mashup of The Bourne Identity and Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is not without its small charms. But it has so many big problems as to make the whole experience more than a little miserable. Turns out, Mike isn’t the tree: This movie is. It’s a disaster waiting to happen, and it truly is trying to keep you from moving on to better fare.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
