Nima Nourizadeh

Remember American Ultra? That movie starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart and their incredibly entertaining chemistry? That started out as a stoner/mumblecore romance and quickly turned into a spy thriller? Director Nima Nourizadeh just can’t get away from espionage, it seems, as he’s been tapped to helm The Tracking of a Russian Spy.

A late August release date typically means one of two things: A movie is terrible or a movie is weird — and therefore difficult to market. American Ultra is a classic example of the latter. The trailers and posters mostly sell it as a wacky stoner action comedy, but drug humor actually plays a fairly small part in the film, which cycles through scenes of bloody horror, government conspiracy, and sincere relationship melodrama. Audiences might go in to American Ultra expecting The Bourne Identity meets Half Baked. They’re going to find something much stranger and more interesting (with a bunch of First Blood and a smidge of rom-com tossed in the mix).