“Although Mr. Eisenberg radiates natural intelligence even when his motor mouth is running on empty dialogue, his character is a grade-A moron,” tut-tuts
trained chemical engineer Dolph Lundgren to Lupe Fiasco can convincingly dumb it down, why not Jesse Eisenberg?
Eisenberg’s cerebral stammer has been mined for LOLs in nearly all of his major roles, perhaps most memorably in
As James Brennan, Eisenberg is venal, clueless, horny, confused, sputtering and, occasionally hopeless. this guy.
But in Hollywood these days, Eisenberg’s natural, genial awkwardness is about as valuable a skill as changing typewriter ribbons. There’s too much natural Zuckerbergian frost to Eisenberg’s schtick to ever believe him waking up with a
Eisenberg
colander on his head. Luckily, Eisenberg has plenty of other actorly abilities to hide his mentally-deficient deficiencies — he’ll soon get to work playing a “baby-faced counter-terrorism expert” in the definitely not-at-all-funny
30 Minutes or Less, that playing simple-minded can be awfully complicated. Tureaud: “I pity the fool.”