Published
American Ultra opened in late August 2015, the traditional shelf for films studios like but do not know how to sell, and the review ran that week. A decade on, the searches that reach it have shifted from “is it good” to “who is in it”, so the review of record now travels with the full cast file it always should have had.
The premise the cast is built on
Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg) is a convenience-store clerk in Liman, West Virginia: anxious, devoted to his girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart), unable to leave town without panic attacks he does not understand. He is also, unknown to himself, the last live asset of a cancelled CIA sleeper program, and when a rising agency careerist (Topher Grace) decides to tidy the file by killing him, a phrase spoken over the counter switches Mike on. The joke of the film is the gap between the two facts: a man who apologises to the people he is disarming, killing professionals with a spoon he happens to be holding.
The two leads, third time around
The Eisenberg–Stewart pairing was the film’s real pitch. Adventureland had made their low-key chemistry famous in 2009; American Ultra weaponises it literally, and Café Society would complete the trilogy a year later. Stewart’s Phoebe is the film’s best trick, written as the stock worried girlfriend for exactly one act, until the story hands her its second-biggest secret. The two play the reveal as a relationship argument rather than a spy beat, which is the moment the film shows what it actually wanted to be: a love story wearing a Bourne costume.
The bench behind them
The supporting cast is deeper than the film’s reputation. Connie Britton is Lasseter, the agent who built the program and burns her career protecting its last graduate; Topher Grace, cast hard against type, plays the ambitious desk man Yates as a tantrum in a suit. Walton Goggins’ Laugher, an assassin who giggles because the program broke something in him, steals the back half, and the film quietly gives him its most humane scene. John Leguizamo turns up as Mike’s dealer, Bill Pullman arrives late as the agency’s adult supervision, and Tony Hale has a small, sweating part as the drone operator with a conscience. The complete billed list is in the table below.
The review of record, and the argument after
The reviews split almost evenly, and along a clean line: the cast praised, the tonal swerves between sweetness and gore debated. What most 2015 reviews could not have predicted is that the film’s afterlife would be dominated by its own screenwriter. When the opening weekend came in soft, Max Landis argued publicly that the failure proved audiences no longer turned out for original scripts — a claim that drew days of rebuttal citing the summer’s original hits, and which made American Ultra shorthand in industry arguments it was too small to carry. The fairer verdict, then and now: a modest, likeable genre hybrid whose cast is the reason it keeps getting rediscovered. No sequel was ever floated, which puts its franchise prospects in the same never-announced column the sequel tracker keeps for bigger films; its two leads’ other pairing is filed under Adventureland in every retrospective the film gets, and Bill Pullman’s fuller history on this site is on his own page.