Top man in rich satire
GREED ★★★ (Cert 15, 104mins)
STEVE Coogan and Rob Brydon will be back on the road in a couple of weeks with the fourth series of Michael Winterbottom’s TV sitcom The Trip. But first the director and the Alan Partridge star will be in cinemas with the third instalment of their unofficial trilogy of films about British business moguls.
While 24 Hour Party People featured “Madchester” music pioneer Anthony H Wilson and The Look Of Love charted the colourful career of porn baron Paul Raymond, Greed takes it aim at high street fashion tycoon Sir Philip Green.
Coogan’s character may be called Sir Richard McCreadie, but in this blunt satire we know all similarities with the Top Shop boss are entirely intentional.
The foul-mouthed billionaire, nicknamed Greedy McCreadie by the tabloids, needs a lift after a humiliating turn at a parliamentary select committee (where lines from Green’s grilling are lifted verbatim).
So he decides to get himself off the front pages and into the celebrity magazines by throwing a lavish 60th birthday bash on the Greek island of Mykonos.The theme will be Gladiator and he wants to fill an amphitheatre with famous faces.
But when his attempt to evict a group of Syrian refugees from a neighbouring beach makes the papers, his paid-for celebrity guests begin to drop out.
Before the games begin, lengthy flashbacks guide us through his career.After running a string of high street stores into the ground, his big break arrives when his now ex-wife
Samantha (Isla Fisher) introduces him to a pack of high-flying bankers.
They lend him the cash to buy out fashion chain Monda. McCreadie then loads the debt back on to the business and gifts his wife a
£1.2 billion dividend.
As the company is in Samantha’s name, and she officially lives on a yacht in Monaco, he doesn’t even need to trouble the taxman.
The details of this entirely legal scam are laid out by Nick (David Mitchell), a morose journalist writing his official biography.
Nick has also been tasked with videoing birthday messages from the impoverished workers in Sri Lanka who make his boss’s clothes. One of
the seamstress’s nieces is Amanda (Dinita Gohil), a British Sri Lankan who is on McCreadie’s staff.
An inner conflict grows when she is tasked with chivvying away the refugees. Before that subplot comes to a head,Winterbottom bloats the film with a clutter of thinly sketched characters, while Stephen Fry and James Blunt manage to raise smiles gamely spoofing themselves.
In The Look Of Love, he drew us into the story by forcing us to sympathise with Raymond.
But McCreadie is just a swine with Simon Cowell’s teeth.
Greed isn’t exactly good, but a steady stream of witty lines keeps this middling satire ticking over.