Starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart. Rated 14A.

For me, part of the fun in watching this strange amalgam of genre tweaks and media spoofs was figuring out how to keep from spoiling the movie’s scheme of gradual shifts and sudden revelations. Turns out, though, that ads for Amalgam Ultra give everything away right off the top. So there’s no reason not to say that rural slacker Mike Howell—played by Jesse Eisenberg, the millennial answer to Bruce Willis—is a CIA sleeper waiting for a big wake-up that comes quite suddenly.

Although secretly trained and drug-enhanced to be a ruthless killing machine, Mike’s fallen so far into his sleepy-stoner role he doesn’t actually remember how he ended up in his podunk Kentucky town (actually Louisiana), working at an always empty supermarket and living with girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart), who’s only slightly more together.

Nothing’s happening in their lives. But then, in a single night, they go through enough shit to make Jason Bourne look like a lightweight. Seriously, it’s all in the trailer.

As in those Bourne-again movies, the trouble comes less from outside agents than from inside the Agency.

A midlevel CIA functionary (Connie Britton) who once ran a program transforming ordinary civilians into low-key superheroes is suddenly upstaged by a young hotshot (Topher Grace) determined to shut down an operation that’s already been forgotten. Here, a movie asks us to believe that the U.S. government would spend millions of dollars and involve many hundreds of soldiers, media collaborators, and vicious mercenaries in an unauthorized “secret” manoeuvre that never needed to be undertaken and is doomed from the start. Like that would ever happen!

Anyway, when Mike discovers his inner ninja, it freaks out Phoebe, but is even weirder to friends like his ghetto-talking dealer (John Leguizamo), not to mention the taxpayer-funded bad guys who come after him—mostly two at a time, by custom.

All of this genial, if highly corpuscular, mayhem comes courtesy of Anglo-Iranian director Nima Nourizadeh (Project X) and screenwriter Max Landis, son of John Animal House Landis. Some National Lampoon–ish flavour has rubbed off on the kid, along with many Tarantino-isms, plus general comic-book frenzy.

The result is a movie for people who hit the multiplex unsure whether to catch a slacker comedy, a superhero movie, a political satire, or an extra-violent action flick. It’s Ultra, so you don’t have to choose!