For someone who hates Comic Con crowds
Jesse Eisenberg sure seems to be making a lot of fanboy friendly movies...
You’re watching Beyond The Trailer’s review of American Ultra...
Hmm, money and fame, or artistic integrity? That seems to be the question that plagues
many actors these days. And while actors like Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska, Eisenberg’s
girlfriend by the way, seem to be able to manage such a balancing act, Eisenberg himself
seems tormented by it. He initially made a name for himself in the industry with smaller
indie films like Roger Dodger, The Squid and the Whale and The Education of Charlie Banks,
but with his success there the bigger pictures came calling. Zombieland, The Social Network,
Now You See Me, the Rio movies! And through it all, Eisenberg’s...unique personality
surely gave his publicist a migraine. He admitted, with some disdain, the he doesn’t actually
watch movies himself. He compared one journalist to Carrot Top. And then of course his most
recent and most infamous comment, likening Comic Con to genocide after attending the
event to promote yet another blockbuster film, Batman v Superman Dawn of Justice. Lucky for
him and Warner Bros, that one’s an ensemble cast. So’s Now You See Me 2! But American
Ultra? That largely hinges on Eisenberg, and it will be interesting to see if the fanboy
audience - which this movie caters to - can get over that comment so soon after it was
made. But interestingly, Eisenberg isn’t the only offensive person associated with
this movie. Kristen Stewart still has her detractors, both for her professional and
personal actions, yet she did just win the French equivalent of an Academy Award for
her supporting role in Clouds of Sils Maria. That film featured a possible romance between
Stewart’s character and Juliette Binoche’s, and in real life Stewart has recently made
headlines for dating a woman herself. Whether or not that will hurt her popularity with
her Twilight fanbase is also a question that American Ultra producers are surely pondering.
Furthermore, American Ultra is written by Max Landis, the son of director John Landis
who infamously directed Twilight Zone where negligence led to three horrific on-set deaths.
Max broke into the biz with Chronicle, and he has a big year in 2015 with American Ultra
and then Victor Frankenstein in November. But despite those high profile releases, he
surely didn’t do himself any favors when he tastelessly added fuel to the Fantastic
Four drama by tweeting out the first few pages of the script he’d submitted for the project
a few years ago. We often debate on this channel if off-screen actions should affect how audiences
feel about what they see on-screen, and American Ultra seems like a perfect test-case for that
- assuming, of course, that it IS a good movie...