American Ultra
Mike Howell (Eisenberg) is an ordinary, unmotivated slacker who lives in a small north-western town with his tomboyish girlfriend, Phoebe Larson (Stewart). Mike works as a clerk at the grocery store and is shocked one day by the incredible ninja-like fighting powers he unleashes on two car jackers. Unknown to Mike, he is a highly trained lethal sleeper agent whose memory has been erased and Phoebe is his covert handler. Both are in danger when a rogue CIA agent (Grace) decides to terminate the sleeper program, and Mike along with it. The CIA leaks a fake malaria outbreak to the media and quarantines the town, cutting the power and releasing hell in the form of helicopters, drone strikes and worst of all, a new breed of deranged killer agents. But Mike’s latent skills have been ‘activated’ and he lets fly with a torrent of kick-assery he didn’t know he was capable of.
Reviews
“Nourizadeh, working with a script by Max Landis, plays Mike's bloody violence like visual guitar riffs, and approaches the martial-arts set pieces with heavily underlined wit.” – New Yorker
“Ultra works by making a potentially messy story rather simple, and by using its carnage as an extension of its comedy. It has no interest in piling on plot minutiae. It's too busy getting to the next bit of mayhem.” – Dallas Morning News
“It's all quite fun to watch, thanks in large part to the script by Max Landis, whose ability to find humor in the middle of a crisis meshes well with Nourizadeh's kinetic directing style.” – San Francisco Chronicle