Greed

Yes Steve Coogan is in this film but people need to just stop assuming it's going to be a comedy. Read all the negative reviews and they all complain about this not being a comedy.

It's not supposed to be a comedy. It's a mockumentary holding a mirror up to society allowing the rich to dodge tax and hire almost slave labour to sustain their empires, with people happily buying slave made products.

I went into this film without knowing anything about it and was pleasantly surprised.

So ignore the people moaning that this isn't a comedy and just watch it for what it actually it.

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.

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.

Greetings again from the darkness. "Greed for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works." Those words were part of the iconic speech from Gordon Gekko (an Oscar winning role for Michael Douglas) in Oliver Stone's 1987 film WALL STREET. Here we are 3 decades later, and there may not be a more tarnished word, attitude, or approach than 'greed', and filmmaker Michael Winterbottom re-teams with his "The Trip" collaborator Steve Coogan to deliver satire on today's ultra-rich.

The always entertaining Mr. Coogan stars as Sir Richard McReadie, also known in the media by numerous other names like: Greedy McReadie, McGreedy, The King of High Street, and The Monet of Money (a label he seemingly applied to himself). Sir Richard is apparently modeled after fashion mogul Sir Philip Green (owner of Top Shop), and with his fake tan and blinding white teeth caps, makes a pretty easy target for Winterbottom's bashing of the too-rich.

A loose structure to the film is provided by the contrast of the coordination and excess going into planning McReadie's upcoming 60th birthday toga bash on the Greek isle of Mykonos, and the official inquiry by Parliament into his questionable business practices. Scenes from the committee hearings are interspersed throughout the film, along with some flashbacks to young McReadie (played by Jamie Blackley) honing his negotiation skills. There is also McReadie's hired biographer Nick (played by David Mitchell), a spineless freelancer thrilled to have the job, despite his initial obliviousness to what McReadie is all about. Although Nick does uncover some of the cruel labor practices, the character seems to be a way for Winterbottom to poke at journalists simultaneously to his scalding the rich. Celebrities for hire also take shot to the bow.

Isla Fisher plays Samantha, McReadie's ex-wife, whose Monaco residence helps hide the family/ex-family fortune. The relationship between these two is not just creepy on the balance sheet, but plays out in ways apparently acceptable to the lifestyles of the wealthy. Asa Butterfield plays their overlooked and underappreciate son Finn, and the always fabulous Shirley Henderson plays Irish mother Margaret in such a way that we wish more of the movie was about her. McReadie's daughter Lily (Sophia Cookson) is pretty funny as she films her Reality TV show in the midst of her father's party preparation ... which includes Bulgarian workers building a replica of a Roman amphitheater to act as the site of a GLADIATOR reenactment - replete with a live lion (not a tiger)!

Sarah Solemani and Dinita Gohil play two of McReadie's key assistants, and provide us a glimpse of how real people struggle to work amidst such waste and ego and unrealistic expectations. McReadie kinda quotes Shakespeare, but we feel certain he's not a well-read man. Instead his talents are in bending a system and forcing others to acquiesce to his demands. The tabletop shell game he mastered as a parlor trick is really just a miniaturized version of his business empire ... trading one highly-leveraged enterprise for the next, while cashing in on the process.

Winterbottom's approach is often confusing and sometimes drifts towards mockumentary for flashbacks and interviews. It's an uneven comedy that works at times, and doesn't at others - not uncommon for satire. Coogan makes McReadie always fun (in a disturbing way) to watch, though the film never clicks better than the Keith Richards moment near the end. The anger-based acidic comedy satirizes what's happening in the real world, and tries to further expose how the mega-rich take advantage of the rest of us. Some well executed bits make this one worth watching, but really offers little in the form of insight or solutions. Instead it's just infuriating ... at least in the parts where we aren't laughing. We certainly don't laugh over the closing credits as real world statistics are provided regarding inequality and third world labor.

It's a pity that this ends with a slide-show of factoids apparently intended to give the issues raised by the film a 'men vs women' or 'third world vs first' slant. Actually, what the all-too-true-to-life story is about is money vs no money: the fact that most of it is scooped up by a few arrogant, entitled, savvy people, and the rest of us - men as much as women, west as much as east - are at their mercy. Haven't we just recently seen the way our former public water utilities have been given the Philip Green treatment by unscrupulous capitalists, 'leveraged' for billions while our rivers are choked with sewage? And similarly, there's a moment of moral clarity about how the amoral 'Green' fails to recognise the moral freight of what he does - 'in his mind, all he does is offer a price' - but the same does not extend to some 'good guy' characters whose actions are simply indefensible.

There's a pinch of amusement here, and a peck of anger, but none of it will have any effect on the Philip Greens of this world. They are too stupid and arrogant to be hurt by satire and, whatever devastation they wreak on others, they somehow always come out on top. Realising that, you can only come away depressed.