Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Topher Grace, Connie Britton, Walton Goggins, John Leguizamo Director: Nima Nourizadeh

    STONERS take a bloodbath in “American Ultra,” a genre mash that’s mildly amusing until it can’t think of anything else to do besides flop around in the deep end of conspicuous gore.

    Those who saw Nima Nourizadeh’s moderately successful first feature “Project X” will have an idea of the excess to expect here, although the commercial- and music video-trained director has thankfully moderated his shaky-cam tendencies this time around.

    Still, sensation is sensation, and there are enough amusingly stupid discussions, nutty characterizations and creatively spiced servings of violence. The lead couple live together in Nowheresville, West Virginia, where no-account Mike (Jesse Eisenberg) dreams of creating a graphic novel while working the night shift at a convenience store. Young woman Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) sticks with this loser no matter that Mike is actually a CIA-trained sleeper agent who will suddenly emerge from his slumber as a slacker James Bond.

    The small-town sluggard stuff of the first 20 minutes or so is genial enough and provokes a few laughs by identifying multiple symptoms of generational differences. But the film lurches from first to fourth gear when overreaching CIA agent Adrian Yates (Topher Grace) decides it’s time to terminate Mike from the Ultra program, an actual agency initiative from the 1950s designed to reprogram select candidates to become superspies and assassins.

    Yates sends a couple of goons up to hicktown to take Mike out, but Mike’s newly awakened powers get the better of them. He and Phoebe soon benefit from the partisanship of Yates’ older underling Victoria (Connie Britton), which evolves into something like “Spy vs. Spy” cartoons, except that they’re supposed to be working for the same side.

    The intermittently wacky, instantly forgettable plot leaves room for some enthusiastically over-the-top supporting turns by energetic character actors who give their all and then some. John Leguizamo as Mike’s ghetto-mouthed local dealer and Walton Goggins as a laughing hyena of a hired killer all but literally bounce off the walls with their amusingly exaggerated antics, while Britton manages to also let it rip when she finally arrives on the scene from D.C.

    Even with its tight running time, “American Ultra” starts spinning its wheels well before the climax, although it’s entirely possible that being in an altered state while watching this will keep the target audience giggling at the repetitive stupid acts all the way to the end. As it is, there are incidental pleasures to be had simply in observing the generally more serious-minded Eisenberg and Stewart slumming in a project that’s dopey in more ways than one and not caring how unkempt, slovenly and un-movie-starish they look and behave.

    The most creative and witty part of the entire film may well be the animated end credits, which have a bracing panache mostly absent from what’s come before.

    The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen. (SD-Agencies)