Greedy People

Do yourself a big favor and skip the trailer. This is a fairly dark movie but I suspect the marketing department didn't quite know how to present it. So they put the lighter/funnier moments in the trailer and turned it loose, hoping for the best.

The movie itself was quite intriguing. A wide assortment of characters, of varying moral character, end up on a slippery downward slope of their own doing.

Excellent cinematography with good acting all around. Tim Blake Nelson? What can I say? I'd watch him read the phone book and he was superb as a slimeball.

Definitely worth watching, just be aware the trailer painted something a bit lighter.

It's probably a movie that well sail under the Grid of a lot of viewers, but it shouldn't be. It a fun and bold crime comedy that gets a little bit dark towards the end of it. It hangs on high branches as a vision and as an inspiration, but it manages to hold any expectations and pulls through a great, interesting, funny and compelling movie with same plot.

Its half mystery and half known. It has a classic format and movie template that is built on the foundation of one domino that is falling and causes the other to get their dance started. One event ignites a chin of hidden events that will reveal what ever needs to get up to the surface and grab you by the balls, to stay and watch the movie with a lot of interest.

It has a fine cast, that includes three main actors that has already built their name through the years and worth buying a ticket for the movie theatre. The one that is pulling the strings (Potsy Ponciroli) is less familiar but has his hands in some good Hollywood projects ("Old Henry", which was his first corporation with Tim Blake Nelson, before the current one).

Ponciroli is doing great work with the setting the paste of the movie and moves elegantly between the genres of comedy and drama until all is set to take the proper direction of thriller and seal the deal with it.

This movie is not perfect or even close to it. It imitates a lot of other the excelled in this genre, but is manages to surprise with its final result. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is stealing the show, as expected and the others are riding along properly, but no one is stealing the show from Ponciroli and his way of paying great tribute to other movies giants.

There is enough going on here to keep you involved. A bunch of people chasing a bag of money and mayhem ensues. The only problem is they never dive deeply into any one character including the mains. Its hard to feel something for people you don't know.

At one point, I was cheering on the hit-men because they were way more interesting than the normies. None of the actors really had a chance to shine because the scenes were a bit chaotic and there was little substantive dialogue. The actress playing the secretary was good. I remember her from Billions and other films.

5 stars - you won't be bored but barely worth the time to type this up.

Police Officer Will Shelley (Himesh Patel) and his very pregnant wife Paige (Lily James) are new to an island community. It's Will's first day at work. He accidentally kills a housewife and finds a load of cash. His partner Officer Terry Brogan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) suggests stealing the cash and faking a robbery homicide.

I have a couple of issues with the money. First, real thieves would never leave the cash with another thief. Will should demand his share right away and hide it himself. Second and more confounding, I don't know how Paige got the cash to the hospital. Did no one ask what's in that plastic bag? It seems highly unlikely. This is nowhere Coen Brothers level, but there is still some good dark humor crime chaos.

Greedy People is a black comedy clearly inspired by the Coen brothers as its colourful cast of characters squabble over a bag of money without communicating to one another, leading to disastrous results. It's obviously not as well done as its inspirations, especially since the shift from quirky comedy to thriller isn't smooth but it remains twisty fun. The humour is mostly front-loaded and the biggest shocks come towards the end.

It starts off as a two-hander between Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Himesh Patel, who have a suitably awkward rapport and Gordon-Levitt's washed up cop who spends his days learning mandarin and playing his own music is definitely the highlight of the whole film. Lily James takes control for a chapter, grappling with what she's doing effectively and Uzo Aduba is the unwavering moral centre in the vein of Marge Gunderson.

Potsy Ponciroli's direction waits until over 20 minutes in to drop the title which works beautifully and the most serious moments taking place in torrential rainfall makes those scenes look so good. The chaptered structure also works with it having a fairly big cast who all do their own things and the film has a real talent for executing those characters. Jordan Lehning's score has a fittingly quirky nature as well which disappears in the second half.