Send-up that’s a bit shop-soiled RETAILER
GREED isn’t exactly good, but a steady stream of sharp lines keeps this middling satire ticking over.
Like all good double acts, Steve Coogan and director Michael Winterbottom have a tendency to bring out the best in each other.
Two out of three series of The Trip were brilliant (not a bad hit-rate) and Coogan was great playing himself and two other characters in A Cock And Bull Story. This one feels like the unofficial third instalment of a trilogy that includes 24 Hour
Party People and The Look Of Love.
While those films charted the colourful careers of real British moguls (Madchester music pioneer Anthony H Wilson and porn baron Paul Raymond), this time the anti-hero is fictional.
Although you suspect any similarities between Coogan’s
Sir Richard McCreadie and certain real-life tycoons are entirely intentional.
The foul-mouthed mogul, nicknamed Greedy McCreadie by the tabloids, needs a lift after a humiliating turn at a parliamentary select committee (where entire lines from a grilling of Topshop tycoon Sir Philip Green 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 (his favourite film) and he wants to fill a hastily assembled amphitheatre with famous faces. He has even shipped in an ageing lion to stand in for the tiger that swatted at Russell Crowe.
But when his attempts to evict a group of Syrian refugees from a neighbouring beach make 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 loan him the cash to buy out the fashion chain Monda. McCreadie then loads the debt back on to the business and gifts his wife a £1.2billion dividend.
As the company is in her 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, below), a morose journalist writing his official biography. Nick has also been tasked with videoing birthday messages from the workers in Sri Lanka who make his boss’ clothes.
McCreadie has struck such a hard bargain with their sweatshops, they are paid less than £4 a day.
One of the workers’ 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.
His son (Asa Butterfield) fancies his dad’s new trophy wife (Shanina Shaik, inset),
Shirley Henderson is his steely
Irish mother and Sophie
Cookson is his reality TV star daughter who has rocked up with a camera crew.
None of them brings much to the party, but Stephen Fry and James Blunt manage to raise smiles gamely spoofing themselves.
Coogan gets all the decent lines, but he’s working well within his comfort zone.
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 the teeth of Simon
Cowell. It’s the perfect time to go after the super-rich, but this blunt satire is missing an edge.