ALSO SHOWING
Greed (15)
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The latest collaboration between Steve Coogan and director Michael Winterbottom (The Trip, 24 Hour
Party People) takes a paw-swipe at the insidious effects of wealth inequality via a satirical portrait of the rise-and-fall of a British highstreet tycoon as he celebrates his 60th birthday with a display of Romanthemed opulence on the Greek Island of Mykonos. A thinly veiled caricature of Topshop owner Philip Green, Coogan’s Richard “Greedy” Mccreadie is presented as an orangeskinned, silver-haired member of the mega-rich whose Uv-white teeth and buffoon-like disposition belie a ruthless ability to make money from bankrupting his various business concerns, avoiding taxes and exploiting his employees, be they inner-circle lackeys, low-paid shopassistants or the many sweatshop workers whose already pitiful wages he keeps driving down in his ongoing quest to cut the cost of outsourcing. Here, Winterbottom and Coogan are generally skilled at combining fingerwagging with rib-tickling, nowhere more so than when Richard’s party encounters a group of (real) Syrian refugees. The film also gleefully calls out well-known high street brands (and the celebrities who endorse them) for using sweatshops – and it takes great delight in mocking the lucrative world of celebrity personal appearances with self-lacerating cameos from the likes of Stephen Fry and Chris Martin. And yet the film also feels a little scattershot in its targets and approach. The combined use of the old Citizen Kane
(by way of The Wolf of Wall Street) biopic structure to track the rise of an unscrupulous rogue, combined with The Big Short-style primers on the intricacies of Richard’s corporate malfeasance, lacks some of the fourth-wall-breaking daring of Winterbottom and Coogan’s earlier collaborations. There’s also the bizarre sight of Shirley Henderson, caked in prosthetics, bobbleheading her way through her scenes as Richard’s elderly Irish mother. True, her casting makes sense for the flashbacks, not least because they bolster the weaker scenes of the younger Richard (played by Jamie Blackley) as an obnoxious school boy starting to make his way in the world. But even in a film that’s unafraid of revelling in the grotesqueries of the world it’s mocking, it’s a bit odd and distracting to see her playing Coogan’s mum. For all its flaws, though, the film does build to an amusingly dark ending, taking a turn into Greek tragedy while never letting us forget the extent to which the rapacious pursuit of profit tarnishes everything.
Like a Boss (15)
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As the break-out star of 2017 hit Girls
Trip, Tiffany Haddish deserves a comedy vehicle to match her talents. This isn’t it. A woefully laugh-light buddy movie in which a pair of childhood friends turned business partners (played by Haddish and Rose Byrne) find their relationship tested when their homegrown make-up company is bought out by a cosmetics giant, the formulaic nature of the plot isn’t really the problem. Indeed there’s actually promise in the way the film is built around best friends whose closeness in all aspects of their daily life (they live, work and party together) has extended way beyond college and into their late thirties. But the film – which is directed by Miguel Arteta and written by Sam Pitman and Adam Cole-kelly – has nothing funny or interesting to say about this kind of adult codependency and its insights into women feel like they’ve been reverseengineered from a Seth Rogen film. Salma Hayek co-stars. ■