Greed (2019)

Some great performances, always great for me to watch Steve Coogan. he plays this so well. Isla Fischer is also worth a mention.

This is entertaining, funny but poignat in places. Thought provoking with a message throughout. Capitalism and the wealth divide.

Well worth a watch.

Fmovies: I just got out of Greed

This is an awfully unfunny Steve Coogan movie. I love Coogan, especially as Alan Partridge, but this is woeful. Even talented people like Isla Fisher, Asa Butterfield (Otis in Sex Education) and Sarah Solemani are just wasted.

Isla Fisher just seems to be there to show plenty of cleavage and talk about her tits. What a total waste of a talented actress.

I got bored and left after about an hour.

This is now my worst movie of the year, replacing Like A Boss. For two reasons!! Salma Hayek talking about her boobs and showing a lot of cleavage is vastly superior to Isla Fisher doing it, and I made it to the end of Like A Boss!!

OK that's a stretch. I only made it to the end to prove a point and test my perseverance.

There were 8 other people in my screening

It is probably best just to assess this satirical comedy on a superficial level; otherwise the hypocrisy is overwhelming. Steve Coogan plays a self made gaziliionaire who is organising a no expense spared celebrity 60th birthday party for himself on Mykonos. In cahoots with his ex-wife Isla Fisher and his mother Shirley Henderson we are exposed to the most vulgar and crass aspects of the mega-rich lifestyle in which they live whilst at the same time exploiting just about everyone that they come into contact with - regardless of gender, education or ethnicity. Jamie Blackley "Young Richard" takes what plaudits there are in this. He is expelled from his posh private school school for regularly fleecing the other pupils; next he is fleecing those in the London rag trade before setting up a discount store that sets the ball rolling for his future billion pound enterprise. Coogan is good as the odious and exploitative "McCreadie"; David Mitchell really wooden as his autobiographer "Nick" and we have a few scenes for Asa Butterfield as his slightly geeky son "Finn" but the rest of this has mis-information and double standards written all over it. The comedy is obvious; the constant parodies from "Gladiator" (quite why the lines spoken in that film by Richard Harris were being delivered by Coogan is an Australian accent was a bit puzzling) grate after a while and the ending just downright ridiculous. If it is attempting some sort of social commentary on how the wealthy get rich on the backs of others then it needed to be much better informed and make some attempt to reconcile the aspirations of rich and poor alike - as well as those of the ever-thrifty, something for nothing consumers living in countries of the "west" and their mind-numbingly incompetent legislators.

Greed fmovies. Winterbottom's stuff is always interesting but unfortunately this one fell at some obvious hurdles. For two thirds it was an effective satire with some good performances (Coogan, as ever, a hoot) and some funny lines but in the final furlong any semblance of subtlety was dropped for silly plot developments and cheap sentiment, bashing the audience over the head with a point that had already been well made. A shame.

Steve Coogan gives a great performance as ever, but the rest of the film didn't quite hold it together.

The message Winterbottom was trying to engage the audience with became too preachy, particularly the end montage of statistics aimed at shaming the fashion industry and its use of sweatshop labour. This was wholly unnecessary as the story made this point without this tacked on piece of activism.

The CGI lion was also disappointing, as was the general direction of the story, and many of the characters felt under-developed and derivative.

It was all a bit too obvious, and very simplistic in its outlook.

We all know that the very wealthy and powerful mostly made that wealth through ruthlessness, this is an old, tired narrative now.

What kind of film is this supposed to be? A comedy? A polemic? A social satire? An expose? It seems to be trying to be all of these simultaneously - and the result is something of a mess.

Steve Coogan is good as a loathsome tycoon who doesn't care who he tramples underfoot as he amasses his fortune. David Mitchell is also good as his bumbling would-be biographer; and the preparations for Coogan's hedonistic birthday bash contain some fine comedy.

But the film also wants to condemn the way the fashion industry is built on the exploitation of workers in Sri Lanka and elsewhere (and everyone who has ever bought clothes in their local High St is complicit in this exploitation). This is a theme worthy of treatment, but to attempt to splice it with the comedic strand of the film jars dreadfully.

The plight of refugees crossing the Mediterranean is also touched upon. Again, this is something we should all be concerned about, but it can hardly be blamed on retail fashion moguls - so why try to shoehorn it into this film?

And as if there wasn't too much in the film already, we also get the filming of some sort of reality TV programme, the relationship of which to the main plot is far from clear.

They say that less is more. In the case of this film, more is less.