Is it possible to make a compelling film without a single likeable character? It’s a proposition that Jesse Armstrong, creator of TV hit “Succession”, tests to the limit in his debut feature film, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. A portrait of four utterly repellent tech billionaires, the movie plays out over a weekend away in the Rockies.
Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), a relative minnow, with only half-a-billion dollars to his name, is hosting the event at Mountainhead, his giant “modernist lair” in Utah. His guests are Randall (Steve Carell), the “pretentious” elder statesman of the group, who has just been diagnosed with cancer; AI genius Jeff (Ramy Youssef); and Venis (Cory Michael Smith), a social media tycoon whose platform, Traam, has made him the world’s richest man.
Their mini-break, with all its gruesome “wealth bragging” and sweary one-upmanship, takes place against the backdrop of growing political unrest, said Kevin Maher in The Times. An AI update to Traam has supercharged fake news, provoking mass rioting and global instability. The tech billionaires then conspire to accelerate this process, with a view to unseating governments and creating a “brotopian” new world order, leading to some increasingly dark plot twists. But if that all sounds quite promising, don’t be deceived: the film is based on a single joke – that “entitled billionaire tech bros are just, like, the worst” – and though it has echoes of “Succession”, it has none of that show’s “emotional complexity” or “Shakespearean grandeur”.
Yes, it does lack the “dramatic richness” of “Succession“, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian; but “the pure density of weapons-grade zingers in the script is a marvel”, and as well as being funny, the film is horribly gripping.
The Succession creator’s first feature film lacks the hit TV show’s ‘dramatic richness’ – but makes for a horribly gripping watch
