Film Reviews: Two amnesiac thrillers that recall earlier films
There have been several films about trained secret super-agents who don’t know that’s what they are, thanks to either an accident or brainwashing by their own side.
But two on the same day? Does that mean it’s becoming its own genre?
Watch the confusion of the ticket seller at your local multiplex if you ask for “that new action thing about someone who only remembers how super they are under deadly threat.” Do you mean “Hitman: Agent 47” or “American Ultra”?
Yes, there was “The Long Kiss Goodnight” (1996), with Geena Davis, and “The Bourne Identity” (2002), with Matt Damon. You can go all the way back to 1972’s “The Groundstar Conspiracy,” with Michael Sarrazin. “The Matrix” (1999) is a first cousin of these, and maybe “Total Recall” (1990) counts, depending on which of Schwarzenegger’s identities was the real one. Can you remember?
In any case, this week’s presumably unplanned coincidence is just weird. The two films take different paths, but their similarities are more numerous than their differences.
In “American Ultra,” the more comic of the two, Mike (Jesse Eisenberg) is a stoner in a small town, his boring life only relieved by his inexplicably doting girlfriend, Phoebe (Kristen Stewart). We wonder what this gem could possibly see in Mike. Mike wonders the same thing. You don’t have to be Donald Trump to regard this guy as a “loser.”
To Mike’s great surprise, he involuntarily exhumes incredible unknown fighting skills and swiftly dispatches two professional assassins who have come to kill him. He eventually realizes that all but his last few years of memories are fakes, implanted to cover up his participation in an abandoned covert CIA experiment to create super warriors. In a few hours, he’s enough up to speed to kill dozens of bad guys ... often in a very gory manner.
Eisenberg isn’t exactly an obvious casting choice for a highly trained killer — even one with amnesia — and that’s really the film’s central joke. There’s a complicated back story to justify what’s happening, and director Nima Nourizadeh and screenwriter Max Landis let us in on almost every detail before they let Mike wise up. Yet the one they withhold until halfway retroactively makes a major character’s actions to date completely nonsensical. Maybe we’re supposed to have caught Mike’s amnesia by then.
“Hitman: Agent 47” — which is, by the way, a reboot of the 2007 video game adaptation “Hitman” rather than a sequel — doesn’t have any slips that big until near the end when the rigging of a major weapon makes no sense in at least two ways. It also doesn’t have nearly as much humor, particularly when you consider that the “funny” aspects of “American Ultra” aren’t all that funny in the first place.
This time, our protagonist-with-powers-she-never-understood is Katia (Hannah Ware), who is trying to locate her father (Ciaran Hinds). Unfortunately, so is the Syndicate, a shadowy (yet at the same time flashy) criminal organization. Dear old Dad, we learn, was the genius behind gene-splicing experiments designed to create — ho hum, again? — ruthless super-warriors. The research was abandoned, but the Syndicate wants to revive it. (Is this a little familiar?)
One of the most sophisticated of these GMOs — genetically modified operatives — is grim-faced Agent 47 (Rupert Friend), who finds Katia. So does John Smith (Zachary Quinto), and there’s a lot of back and forth about which is the good guy and which the bad guy.
Where “American Ultra” is funky and low-tech, “Hitman: Agent 47” is all crisp and high-tech, both in the visual style and the fight choreography. Many of the action concepts are genuinely clever, something “Ultra” barely attempts. There is more gore here — which is saying something — and more excitement. It’s also, by design, much colder, with minimal emotional interplay.
Funky, overly familiar action shtick, gory, and emotionally engaging versus crisp, inventive, even gorier and cold. Choose your genetically modified poison.
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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).