The shopping boss who’s off his trolley
GREED
★★★✩✩
(Cert 15, 104 mins)
Director: Michael Winterbottom Stars: Steve Coogan, Isla Fisher, David Mitchell, Asa Butterfield
LIKE A BOSS
★★✩✩✩
(Cert 15, 83 mins)
Director: Miguel Arteta
Stars: Rose Byrne, Tiffany Haddish, Salma Hayek, Billy Porter
CALL OF THE WILD
★★★✩✩
(Cert PG, 100 mins)
Director: Chris Sanders
Stars: Harrison Ford, Dan Stevens, Omar Sy
LIKE ALL good double acts, Steve Coogan and director Michael Winterbottom seem to bring out the best in one another.two out of three series of TV road trip sitcom The Trip were brilliant (which ain’t bad, according to Meat Loaf) and Coogan was a triple hit playing himself and two other characters in A Cock And Bull Story.
Greed 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 business moguls (pop pioneer Anthony H Wilson and porn baron Paul Raymond) this time the anti-hero is fictional.although I suspect all similarities between Coogan’s Sir Richard Mccreadie and disgraced Top Shop boss Sir Philip Green are entirely intentional.
The foul-mouthed Mccreadie needs a lift after an humiliating turn at a parliamentary select committee (where entire passages 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 (his favourite film), and he wants to fill his hastily-assembled amphitheatre with famous faces. 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. “George Michael is dead,” he deadpans when surveying the lookalikes hired by his panicking assistant.
Before the games begin, lengthy flashbacks guide us through Mccreadie’s career. His big break arrives when his now ex-wife Samantha (Isla Fisher) introduces him to a pack of bankers on her yacht in Monaco.they loan him the money to buy out fashion chain Monda.
Mccreadie then loads the debt on to the business and gives his non-dom wife a £1.2billion dividend.
The details of this shockingly entirely legal scam are laid out by Nick (David Mitchell), a morose journalist writing his official biography.the writer has also been tasked with videoing birthday messages from the Sri Lankan workers who are paid £4 a day to knock out Mccreadie’s clothes.
Just when you think
Nick is about to flip on his employer, Winterbottom turns his attention to Mccreadie’s family.
His two kids (Asa Butterfield and Sophie Cookson) don’t bring 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 is working well within his comfort zone. In The Look Of Love, he drew us into the story by forcing us to sympathise with Raymond. Mccreadie is simply a swine with Simon Cowell’s teeth. Greed isn’t good but a steady stream of sharp lines keep it ticking over.
Like A Boss also gives us a behindthe-scenes look at the retail business, although this limp US comedy is too busy preaching female empowerment to craft any decent jokes.
Sensible Mel (Rose Byrne) and loose cannon Mia (Tiffany Haddish) have been best friends since childhood and now co-own a cosmetic store and make-up line.when they get in trouble with the bank, a white knight arrives in the suspicious shape of Salma Hayek’s shrill cosmetics mogul who offers them a deal that hasn’t featured in any of the 17 series of Dragons’ Den – she will wipe out their half-million dollar debt for 49 per cent of the business, but if the friends ever fall out she’ll get the lot.
Before the inevitable happens, Byrne, Haddish and Billy Porter (who as their gay assistant is the only non-creepy male character) each gets a brief chance to show off their gifts for physical comedy.
Porter’s mad flounce and Byrne’s awkward dance are definitely funny. But with a script as lazy as this, it’s like putting lipstick on a pig.
Harrison Ford plays second fiddle to a CGI canine in Call Of The Wild,a lively adaptation of the Jack London novella set during the Alaskan Gold
Rush. Ford only pops up in the second half but logic doesn’t stop him narrating the life of eerily intelligent St Bernard/ collie Buck (a motion-captured Terry Notary) from the start.
Buck is a pampered pooch in California before he’s sold to Omar Sy’s postman to work on his sled delivery team in the Yukon.after performing heroics in a couple of lively action scenes, he ends up shackled to an English villain (Dan Stevens) before finding a more humane master in Ford’s grief-stricken prospector.
Using CGI animals yields mixed results. Buck can perform feats that would be beyond a real mutt, but they never look entirely real. Still, small children should enjoy his harmonica playing and the perky mutt forms a decent double act with a growly Ford.