Director: Jesse Armstrong
Starring: Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith, Ramy Youssef
Running Time: 109 minutes
Synopsis: Four wealthy tech industry friends reunite at a lavish mountain-top villa in Utah. Ven (Cory Michael Smith) has just unleashed an AI app enabling deepfakes that are triggering worldwide unrest. Jeff (Ramy Youssef) disapproves of Ven's profiteering attitude and is unwilling to sell him his counter-deepfake application. Souper (Jason Schwartzman) owns the villa but is desperate to make his first billion, while Randall (Steve Carell) is the group's inspiration and guru. Over a couple of days, their grand dreams of global domination reveal schisms that spill into plans for violence.
What Works Well: The premise of tech bros goofing around at the top of a mountain while the world burns beneath them is a promising demonstration of warped thinking, narcissism, and sharp intellects targeting all the wrong objectives.
What Does Not Work As Well: Writer and director Jesse Armstrong badly flubs the execution, surrendering to theatrical trappings and somehow wasting most of the running time on an unworthy doofus murder plot. Other wayward distractions include a catastrophic addiction to profanities, and long-winded self-obsessed conversations about governing Argentina and achieving transhumanism. It's all supposed to be satirical and ironically dumb in a smart way, but it's just plain tiresome.
Key Quote:
Ven (watching videos of global violence erupting): Not real. Heads don't explode like that.
Souper: Heads don't explode like that?
Ven: No.
No comments:
Post a Comment
We welcome reader comments about this post.