American Ultra

Straight Outta Compton dominated the box office for the second weekend in a row, ensuring that every other movie in the top 10 that doesn’t feature Tom Cruise trembled in its mighty wake. Anyone with their finger on the cultural pulse foresaw the N.W.A. biopic doing well, but it’s performing above and beyond all expectations.

When you type the words “Jesse Eisenberg bad interview” into Google, you get over 2 million results.

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).

While some of you may scoff at the notion of Jesse Eisenberg playing Lex Luthor, here’s a role he’s undoubtedly well-suited to play: a stoner convenience store clerk. Okay, except he’s also a sleeper agent for a secret government program, and in the latest trailer for American Ultra, he kills two guys with a spoon. A spoon.

Watching the American Ultra trailer, it‘s easy to imagine the quick pitch that sold everyone on this project. What if you merged The Bourne Identity with a stoner comedy? And made it so violent and filthy that it required a NSFW red band preview to properly sell its contents? Oh, and what if it stars Jesse Eisenberg as the world’s least likely black ops assassin and Kristen Stewart as his girlfriend? Yeah, American Ultra certainly looks nutty.