Based on Nathanial Philbrick's 2000 book chronicling the whaleship Essex and its crew's 1820 ordeal that inspired Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Ron Howard's $100 million IN THE HEART OF THE SEA was a costly box office bomb for Warner Bros, grossing just $25 million domestically. The film was shot in late 2013 and originally set to be released in March 2015 but was delayed for nine months after a skittish Warner Bros. decided to piss away more money by converting it to 3-D. Considering they had all that extra time to get it right, IN THE HEART OF THE SEA often looks shockingly bad when it isn't on land, and that's not something you want in a nautical adventure. The greenscreen work and CGI are utterly and unacceptably atrocious for such an expensive production. The CGI waves and whales aren't the least bit convincing, and in any scene on the Essex, it never once looks like the actors are anywhere other than a giant soundstage with their surroundings to be filled in later. It looks about as believable as SIN CITY. There's no excuse for a major studio movie to look this shitty, and you know something's wrong when the best parts of the film are the framing device that Howard and screenwriter Charles Leavitt (K-PAX, BLOOD DIAMOND, SEVENTH SON) completely made up. In 1850, Melville (Ben Whishaw) visits aging Essex survivor Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson; Tom Holland plays Nickerson in the 1820 scenes) on Nantucket Island to interview him about what happened. Whishaw and Gleeson are very good, as is Michelle Fairley (GAME OF THRONES) as Nickerson's devoted wife, but the trouble is, it's complete dramatic license: Melville never met Nickerson and never used his specific story as the basis for his novel--he read stories of the Essex and took it from there. So that leaves us with Chris Hemsworth (star of Howard's racing flop RUSH, which has found a minor cult following) as first mate Owen Chase, and Benjamin Walker (ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER) as Capt. George Pollard, butting heads and nearly coming to blows before a vengeful whale sinks their ship and leaves them and the crew lost at sea for 90 days, emaciated and forced to resort to cannibalizing their fallen shipmates--special appearance by Cillian Murphy as dinner--and drawing straws to see who should be killed to provide more sustenance to stay alive as the whale continues to relentlessly pursue them.
Its dismal box office further evidence that no one cares about Chris Hemsworth outside of a Marvel movie (and I'm someone who was a huge fan of BLACKHAT) or Benjamin Walker in anything (how did Jai Courtney or Sam Worthington not end up in this?), IN THE HEART OF THE SEA is a hot mess and probably Howard's worst film, though I'm not about to watch THE DILEMMA to say for certain. Nothing works except the framing story, and that's only because Gleeson, Whishaw, and Fairley manage to rise above the bullshit and give this thing some modicum of dignity. Chase and Pollard are such paper-thin characters--Chase is from a poor family, Pollard from a rich one, so of course they clash when Pollard throws his weight around and Chase is resentful since he was promised his own ship--that you never care about them, and every single moment on the Essex is bathed in such smudgy, smeary, bush-league CGI artifice that all you can focus on is how amateurishly shoddy the whole thing looks. Was Howard honestly happy with how this turned out? I haven't even mentioned that he uses more obnoxious lens flare than in the entire filmography of J.J. Abrams. There are shots in this film that don't even look finished, and for something that was delayed for nine months, Warner Bros, Howard, and everyone else behind the scenes really have no excuse for why John Huston's 1956 film version of MOBY DICK looks better than something made nearly 60 years later. Ugly, uninvolving, unending, and at times unwatchable, the dumbfounding, embarrassing IN THE HEART OF THE SEA has to be one of the worst big-budget films to come from a major director in a long time. (PG-13, 122 mins)
MOJAVE
(US - 2015)
William Monahan got an Oscar for his screenplay for Martin Scorsese's THE DEPARTED, and went on to script films like BODY OF LIES and the OK remake of THE GAMBLER, but misfired a bit with his directorial debut, the 2011 Scorsese-meets-Guy Ritchie knockoff LONDON BOULEVARD. Monahan's second effort as a director is the woefully self-indulgent MOJAVE, a gabby would-be thriller that constantly gets bogged down in pretentious, floridly overwritten conversations where capable actors play characters who say things like "I don't even know if you exist...as I understand existence," and somehow manage to keep a straight face. Monahan can't seem to decide if he wants to make a desert-set noir thriller or an industry-insider bitchfest about debauched Hollywood jagoffs, so he throws both ideas together to make a thoroughly miserable shit sandwich of a movie that could've easily been titled ZABRISKIE POINTLESS. Self-absorbed filmmaker Tom (Garrett Hedlund) heads out to the desert to clear his head, or whatever self-absorbed asshole filmmakers do in the desert. After crashing and abandoning his producer's Jeep, he sets up a small camp and encounters eccentric drifter Jack (Oscar Isaac). Jack is the "Mojave Murderer," a desert-dwelling serial killer who sees in Tom the perfect patsy on which to pin his crimes. Tom gets the upper hand, knocking Jack out cold and fleeing on foot. The next day, Tom accidentally kills a sheriff's deputy and Jack witnesses it. Getting to the nearest town, Tom arranges for a ride back to L.A. with all the incriminating evidence in tow, while Jack finds the abandoned Jeep and, from the vehicle registration, gets an address to make his way to L.A. to stalk Jack and finish whatever it is they started.
Once Jack gets to L.A. and starts trying to ingratiate himself into Tom's professional and personal circle, first allowing himself to get picked up by a gay producer and killing him and later showing up in the backyard of Tom's French actress mistress (Louise Bourgoin), MOJAVE has no idea what it's doing or where it's going. It never recovers from a terrible scene where Tom sulks in an empty bar and Jack finds him, and the final resolution is anything but final or a resolution. MOJAVE pretends to be a cat-and-mouse thriller but it's more of a bile-soaked screed by Monahan, who takes MAPS TO THE STARS-level cheap shots at easy targets like navel-gazing auteurs, bitchy starlets, indifferent agents, and coked-up, degenerate producers, the latter represented in a grating supporting turn by Mark Wahlberg, doing a favor for his buddy Monahan but drawing the line at having his name used in the advertising. Wahlberg is Norman, the producer of Tom's latest, troubled film and the owner of the crashed Jeep, though his biggest concern seems to be spending his days lounging in his bathrobe and getting hummers from on-call prostitutes. So edgy! Hedlund is a mumbling, catatonic bore, Wahlberg bloviates and overacts, and Walton Goggins is all impenetrable dime-store Zen bullshit as Tom's agent. Isaac actually seems to be having a good time, and he's the sole saving grace, but this is a big stumble in an otherwise impressive run with the likes of A MOST VIOLENT YEAR, EX MACHINA, the HBO miniseries SHOW ME A HERO, and STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS making him happen over the last year and a half or so. A24 also released A MOST VIOLENT YEAR and EX MACHINA, and Isaac is likely the only reason they picked this up, but it only got a token limited theatrical release after premiering on DirecTV. Little more than 90 minutes of tough-guy posturing, existential ennui, and tired doppelganger foreshadowing (you could make a drinking game out of how many times Tom and Jack refer to each other as "brother") that leads you to expect an inane FIGHT CLUB-derived twist that, like the point of MOJAVE, never comes, this film fails on almost every level. The only really good line is when Jack, perhaps representing Tom's conscience, tears into the opportunistic, fame-whoring filmmaker and wonders about all the old friends he's left behind, asking him "Are you in touch with anybody not useful?" Monahan is too head-over-heels in love with everything he wrote to effectively function as a director, which is strangely fitting since he has no one other than himself in mind for an audience. MOJAVE is an impossible film to like, though I'm sure it'll find a cult following because, well, what terrible movie doesn't these days? (R, 93 mins)
Bernard Rose's ongoing freefall into absolute irrelevance continues with this aggressively awful, straight-to-DVD/Blu-ray modern updating of Mary Shelley's classic novel, co-produced by Avi Lerner and Cannon cover band NuImage. Rose, who established his horror bona fides with 1989's PAPERHOUSE and 1992's CANDYMAN, hasn't made a good film since the late '90s (his most recent efforts include the found-footage SX_TAPE and the atrocious Paganini biopic THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST) and for a while, his take on FRANKENSTEIN is promising enough that it starts looking very much like a comeback. Accordingly, since everything Rose has touched for nearly the last 20 years turns to shit, so goes FRANKENSTEIN. Set in present-day Los Angeles, the film finds Victor Frankenstein (Danny Huston) and his wife Elizabeth (Carrie-Anne Moss) conducting top-secret experiments at a high-tech research facility. Using digital technology, they've created "Adam" (Xavier Samuel), who's essentially a baby in the body of an adult. Elizabeth bottle-feeds him and Adam learns to say "Mama," but the experiment is deemed a failure when boils start developing all over his body. An attempt at euthanizing him fails when the presumed-dead Adam jerks awake as his skull is being sawed open. He escapes from the facility and creates havoc all over Los Angeles, with the strength of ten men and seemingly impervious to bullets. When he's arrested and the cops find Elizabeth's work ID in Adam's possession, they call her in but Adam goes berserk when she claims to have never seen him before. Rejected by his "mother," the increasingly monstrous-looking Adam escapes police custody and is befriended by homeless, guitar-strumming blind man Eddie (Rose's CANDYMAN star Tony Todd), who dubs him "Monster" and hooks him up with Wanda (Maya Erskine), an area streetwalker-with-a-heart-of-gold who takes him to a fleabag motel and doesn't seem to mind that he's starting to resemble The Toxic Avenger.
Until Adam escapes from Frankenstein's research lab, FRANKENSTEIN is actually OK. Samuel's performance was credible and there seemed to be enough clever ideas that this was shaping up to be a promising reinterpretation and Rose's best film in a long time (particularly memorable is a ghoulishly macabre bit where Adam gets the upper hand on the Frankenstein associate--named Dr. Pretorius, of course--conducting his autopsy). But once Adam is out of the lab and on the streets, FRANKENSTEIN just crashes and burns on an almost LEGION level. It's not really conveyed in a proper time element how Adam goes from having the cognitive and motor skills of an infant to learning how to shower, being coordinated enough to take on a couple of gang members, and eventually programming a GPS on a dead hooker's smart phone to find out where the Frankensteins live, possibly the dumbest tech-based plot development in a horror movie since Simon Callow faxed his own ejaculate in 2009's unwatchable CROWLEY. Approaching FRANKENSTEIN with the apparent goal of turning it into MARY SHELLEY'S TIME OUT OF MIND, the second half of the film focuses on the friendship between Adam and Eddie, in a tired and obvious revamping of the blind hermit segment in James Whale's THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, moved to the mean streets of L.A. Rose throws in embarrassingly ham-fisted commentary on bad L.A. cops (one is played an overacting Jeff Hilliard in the world's worst tribute to Bill Paxton-as-Hudson-in-ALIENS), and even resorts to a philosophical Eddie invoking Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's "Free at last!" in reference to Adam. Rest assured, Rose is taking this completely seriously, but you may be distracted when your mind wanders off to questions like "Who thought this was a good idea?" and "Does this take place in a world where Frankenstein movies have never existed?" and "At what point do Rose's loved ones stage an intervention?" He tweaks elements of both the novel and the early FRANKENSTEIN films that starred Boris Karloff, and yes, there's even a climactic funeral pyre, where CGI flames engulf both the monster and what's left of Rose's credibility as a filmmaker. (R, 90 mins)
DIABLO
(US - 2016)
Scott Eastwood looks and sounds a lot like his legendary dad Clint, and that was probably all the makers of DIABLO felt they needed to make it work. It also borrows core ideas from THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES and UNFORGIVEN and enough of a particular 1973 western that one could sarcastically dub this HIGH PLAINS POSEUR. The setting is Colorado in 1872, and Eastwood is Jackson, a Civil War vet whose farm is set ablaze by a gang of Mexicans who take off with his new bride Alexsandra (Camilla Belle). Following the trail south to Mexico, Jackson sets off on a vigilante mission to rescue his wife and kill her abductors. He's hindered in his efforts by the mysterious Ezra (THE HATEFUL EIGHT's Walton Goggins), an overtly Mephistophelian figure who keeps appearing on the trail saying things like "Your soul is the toll," and "You're on my road, you pay my price." It's some pretty obvious soul-sellling, "Road to Hell" symbolism that probably seems like deep stuff to screenwriter Carlos De Los Rios, whose credits include several Asylum mockbusters like THE DA VINCI TREASURE and PIRATES OF TREASURE ISLAND. Unfortunately, De Los Rios and director Lawrence Roeck (who has a tenuous connection to Clint; he was a camera operator on THE EASTWOOD FACTOR, one of former Time film critic and full-time Clint BFF Richard Schickel's shamelessly slurping documentaries on the iconic actor) aren't done yet, as DIABLO goes along on an unspectacular but inoffensive path until about 50 minutes in, with a total bullshit plot twist that's the hoariest cliche this side of waking up and finding that it was all a dream. You can't even hint at what it involves without completely giving it away, but let's say the twist is similar to a certain beloved 1999 film with an unreliable narrator. The twist completely derails Eastwood's performance which, while not great, was decent enough to that point to carry a small, low-key western that inexplicably feels the need to switch gears and become a horror movie midway though. There's some really beautiful cinematography by the veteran Dean Cundey and brief appearances by jobbing pros like Danny Glover, Adam Beach, and Joaquim de Almeida, but by the time the asinine finale rolls around, DIABLO only succeeds in shooting itself in the foot. (R, 83 mins)
THE HATEFUL EIGHT (US - 2015) Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Demian Bichir, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Channing Tatum, James Parks, Zoe Bell, Lee Horsley, Gene Jones, Dana Gourrier, Keith Jefferson, Craig Stark, Belinda Owino. (R, 168 mins) Quentin Tarantino's second consecutive western (after 2012's spaghetti tribute DJANGO UNCHAINED) is a three-hour epic that's equal parts classic western, Agatha Christie mystery, Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, bitterly misanthropic screed, and a horrific, splatter-filled gorefest. It has everything you'd want in a Tarantino film--quotable dialogue, vividly-detailed characters, a spirited love of all cinematic genres, and some truly inspired creative violence. But it's also Tarantino at his most self-indulgent. THE HATEFUL EIGHT is a very good movie that could've been a great one if there was less of it. For the first time since the 107-minute European cut of DEATH PROOF, the shorter version of which was his contribution to GRINDHOUSE, a Tarantino film has moments of rambling, florid overwriting. Tarantino characters have a lot to say, but in THE HATEFUL EIGHT, they simply talk too much. And then they talk some more. It's the stagiest Tarantino film--even more so than his 1992 debut RESERVOIR DOGS, which had a lot more cutaways and flashbacks and was an hour shorter--but that's by design. For about 90 minutes, THE HATEFUL EIGHT is top-tier Tarantino, with a deliberate buildup that brings a group of wildly disparate characters together during a blizzard and the audience can just lean back and watch a great filmmaker get great performances out of his cast, letting the story gradually build into a stomach-knotting powderkeg of suspense and tension. But then Tarantino loses focus, a couple of major characters are Janet Leigh'd out of the film far earlier than you'd expect, and then it becomes a bit of an unwieldy mess, complete with the requisite Tarantino flashbacking, fractured timelines that bring both plot threads together. To call Tarantino self-indulgent is like calling water wet, but as a director, he's growing too enamored of the words of his favorite writer--Quentin Tarantino--to remain objective. DJANGO UNCHAINED ran a little long, but THE HATEFUL EIGHT starts to feel oppressive after a while, its story not nearly substantive enough to justify its bloated run time. It may sound like I didn't care for it, but I liked it quite a bit. I just would've preferred less of it.
Set several years after the end of the Civil War, THE HATEFUL EIGHT opens during a Wyoming blizzard as a stagecoach heads toward the mountain town of Red Rock. Bounty hunter and former Union Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), with the corpses of three outlaws in tow, hitches a ride on the coach transporting legendary bounty hunter John Ruth, aka "The Hangman" (Kurt Russell), who's taking his latest capture, outlaw Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to hang in Red Rock (she's wanted dead or alive, but as Ruth says, "I don't like to cheat the hangman"). As the blizzard gets closer and travel becomes more treacherous, they decide they'll have to wait it out at a lodge called Minnie's Haberdashery. Warren and Ruth form a Leone-esque unholy alliance to have one another's backs with their respective bounties, and on the way to Minnie's, they're joined by another traveler, new Red Rock sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), on his way to being sworn in and whose horse broke a leg in the storm and had to be killed. Mannix is the son of a legendary Confederate officer and tensions flare with Warren over old North and South grudges. Coach driver O.B. (James Parks) gets them to Minnie's to find others stranded: former Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern); cowboy Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), who's penning his memoirs; the very British Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), Red Rock's hangman; and Bob (Demian Bichir), a Mexican employee of Minnie's. Owners Minnie and Sweet Dave are nowhere to be found and Bob claims they went to visit Minnie's mother on the other side of the mountain and left him in charge. Warren is suspicious of their absence (Bob: "Are you calling me a liar?" Warren: "Not yet") and Ruth doesn't trust anyone in the group, remaining shackled to Daisy in the event anyone plans on collecting the $10,000 reward for her capture. Words are exchanged, war-era grievances exhumed, and alliances shift as it becomes clear that at least one person in the room isn't who they claim to be.
Though it doesn't involve an alien creature, the scenario should sound familiar to any Kurt Russell fan who's seen John Carpenter's 1982 version of THE THING. That's one of the most obvious homages in THE HATEFUL EIGHT, right down to the film's use of unused cues from the legendary Ennio Morricone's THING soundtrack (one of the very few times a Carpenter film was scored by someone other than Carpenter). Though Tarantino uses his usual mix-tape approach to scoring the film, throwing in some Roy Orbison and The White Stripes as well as a memorable borrowing of Morricone's "Regan's Theme" from EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC, the film also contains some original Morricone music written specifically for it. Tarantino's grandiose vision for THE HATEFUL EIGHT borders on hubris at times--who else would stage an overlong drawing-room mystery taking place mostly on one set while shooting in Ultra Panavision 70, a 65mm format that hasn't been used since 1966 (in keeping with that, a roadshow edition running 175 minutes (plus an intermission and an overture with some new Morricone music, debuted on 100 screens a week earlier than this general release version)? The snowy exteriors look incredible on a big screen, and Tarantino's the kind of gifted filmmaker who can make such lofty ambitions work in such a claustrophobic setting, also tossing in a few unmistakably De Palma split diopter shots to make the really hardcore movie nerds trickle a little with giddy excitement (guilty as charged).
From Tarantino's ego (the opening credits declare "The 8th Film by Quentin Tarantino," and midway through, he can't resist giving himself the role of narrator) to the inflated length to the use of Ultra Panavision for what's mostly a single-set production, everything about THE HATEFUL EIGHT is grandiosely overblown, including--intentionally so--the performances. Russell fans will be delighted to see him resurrecting the John Wayne swagger he used as Jack Burton in 1986's BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, though his better--and more restrained--2015 western performance can be seen in BONE TOMAHAWK. Jackson does his furious indignation schtick that no one does better, and no one drops an enraged "motherfucker" quite like him (and he gets to spit out his most vile Tarantino monologue yet with a story he tells Dern's Smithers about crossing paths with his son), and Leigh is positively feral at times, especially once she's missing some teeth and covered in blood and brain matter, looking like a possession victim in a '70s EXORCIST ripoff by the end. THE HATEFUL EIGHT is a film that's unmistakably the work of its mad scientist auteur creator, showcasing both his strengths and weaknesses, and operating at an estimated rate of 75% riveting to 25% tedious. Tarantino is one of the very few major directors whose new films constitute a legitimate event, but he could really stand to start taking a "less is more" approach.
Over her legendary career, Meryl Streep has demonstrated that she's capable of pretty much everything, so while it may seem like a stretch to imagine her as an aging rocker, it doesn't take long to accept her in the role. Streep is Ricki Rendazzo, who's more or less a D-list Bonnie Raitt in the grand scheme of things: her classic rock cover band Ricki and the Flash have a loyal following as the house band at a Tarzana bar that draws the same crowd every night of the week, but after one unsuccessful album over 20 years ago, she never came close to hitting the big time. Ricki's pursuit of fame and fortune came at a price: in the late '80s, she walked away from her life as Indianapolis housewife Linda Brummel, and though she's made sporadic appearances in the lives of ex-husband Pete (Kevin Kline) and their children, her job as a mother has been fulfilled by Pete's second wife Maureen (Audra McDonald). Now, Ricki has been summoned back to Indianapolis after her daughter Julie (Streep's daughter Mamie Gummer) attempts suicide when her husband leaves her for another woman. Had RICKI AND THE FLASH kept that dysfunctional family dynamic as its focus, it would've been a lot better than the film that screenwriter Diablo Cody (JUNO) and the great director Jonathan Demme (STOP MAKING SENSE, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS) ended up making. For a while, it goes along similar lines as the Cody-scripted YOUNG ADULT, even resorting to some well-done scenes of squirming discomfort, as when Ricki and Pete confront Julie's estranged, dickhead husband at a bar. I also like the approach Cody takes with Kline's Pete, who's happier with Maureen, has made peace with the past and, surprisingly by Hollywood standards, has moved on with his life and honestly harbors no resentment toward his ex-wife. Even more against convention, he may still have feelings for her but stops himself from acting on them. And Ricki's presence--and her tentative reconnection with her daughter and her sons, one sympathetic and forgiving (Sebastian Stan), the other bitter and resentful (Nick Westrate)--does manage to pull Julie off the ledge and get her taking steps toward rebuilding her life.
But then Demme abandons that, almost completely. Pete, Julie, and the rest disappear for a long stretch as Ricki returns to Tarzana and gets serious with her guitarist/boyfriend Greg (Rick Springfield) before heading back to Indianapolis for her son's wedding. It's here where Demme sees fit to turn the film into a less caustic version of his own RACHEL GETTING MARRIED before letting it careen into full-on feelgood bullshit with a cast sing-along as Ricki and the Flash boot the wedding band off stage as the uptight onlookers sneer their disapproval but are eventually won over, get up and start dancing. Yes, a blunt and honest film about fractured family dynamics and decades-old wounds turns into a movie that ends with everyone getting over hating Ricki (and her far-right politics, which are introduced and promptly forgotten) and joining her onstage for a big, triumphant jam session at her son's wedding reception. Streep, Springfield (who's quite good here) and the band playing the Flash (featuring guys like keyboardist Bernie Worrell and drummer Joe Vitale) are really playing the songs, and Demme seems more interested in letting Streep show off her rhythm guitar skills and her singing voice in full-length Tom Petty, U2, and Bruce Springsteen covers. RICKI AND THE FLASH just utterly collapses in its second half to the point where it's not out of the question to wonder if Ricki is imagining the whole thing. The first half is honest, smart, and occasionally scathingly funny (Julie to Ricki: "Do you have a gig or do you always dress like a hooker from NIGHT COURT?"), but it just skids to a halt in the second half with one endless song after another and that godawful finale. And why is the bartender from Tarzana dancing at the wedding in Indianapolis? The band making the trip is silly enough, but the fucking Ricki superfan bartender? Was Demme shooting the movie and realized Cody only had 50 minutes of script, so he decided to wing it the rest of the way? (PG-13, 101 mins) AMERICAN ULTRA (US/Switzerland - 2015)
A one-joke comedy that plays like a mash-up of screenwriter Max Landis' DVD collection, AMERICAN ULTRA initially seems like one of those movies that's trying too hard to be an instant cult classic until you realize it isn't trying to be much of anything at all. A splattery, stoner take on THE BOURNE IDENTITY, AMERICAN ULTRA takes place in the fictional West Virginia town of Liman, where pot-addled slacker Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg) works at a carryout and spends his free time getting baked with his live-in girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart). But it turns out Mike is a CIA sleeper agent in the top-secret Ultra program and only becomes aware of his abilities as an unstoppable killing machine when he's activated by Agent Lasseter (Connie Britton), who's trying to save him from the machinations of Yates (Topher Grace), an ass-kissing agency douchebag hellbent on eliminating all traces of the Ultra program. As CIA agents and covert assassins converge on Liman, with the media being fed a story about the town being quarantined, Mike and Phoebe try to stay alive, with Mike instinctively--though he's too perpetually high to figure out how--using anything at his disposal to kill the assets sent to make him vanish.
I'm not sure anyone was demanding a BOURNE movie filtered through HALF-BAKED, but the results are neither as goofy as you'd expect nor as funny as Landis (son of John and writer of the overrated CHRONICLE) thinks. The weed angle is eventually abandoned altogether as ULTRA becomes a lot like a conventional thriller with only the cartoonish, PUNISHER; WAR ZONE-level splatter and would-be CRANK-style gonzo attitude to indicate that it's supposed to be played for laughs. Eisenberg and Stewart fared much better together in ADVENTURELAND, and director Nima Nourizadeh (the found-footage teen comedy PROJECT X) has a great supporting cast at his disposal but doesn't do much with them: Grace, not the most plausible casting for the head of a secret division of the CIA, can play this kind of unctuous turd in his sleep, Bill Pullman has a few scenes as a CIA big shot, John Leguizamo pops up as a strip club owner who's also Mike's dealer, Tony Hale does his umpteenth variation on Buster Bluth as a needy, nervous Lasseter underling, and only Walton Goggins makes a memorable impression as a constantly-laughing assassin named (wait for it) Laugher, whose comedic demeanor masks a depressed cognizance of his autonomy and individuality being stripped from him by his CIA brainwashers. That's as close as AMERICAN ULTRA comes to making a statement about anything. In the end, it's a lot of noise, a lot of CGI (even the exhaled pot smoke is CGI'd!), and not much funny. THE BOURNE LEBOWSKI, it ain't. (R, 96 mins)
