rated R/TV-MA | starring Steve Carrell, Corey Michael Smith, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef | written & directed by Jesse Armstrong | 1 hr 48 mins | 2 1/2 out of 5 |
Fresh off of a career high with the monumental HBO series Succession, Jesse Armstrong burns a bit of that credit with the made-for-HBO Mountainhead, a mostly single-location 4-handed satire about the wealthy, misinformation and well that’s it. It’s a crisp looking film in a beautiful setting, a slick, high tech mountainside luxury cabin just to emphasize that it’s a wish-fulfillment movie that wants to pretend to condemn wealth and all that it takes to acquire it.
But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Venis (Corey Michael Smith, coming off a showstopping Chevy Chase performance in Saturday Night) has just launched a new app that allows for a completely free flow of information as he jets off to a guy’s poker weekend with fellow billionaires, Randall (Steve Carrell), their billionaire father figure, Soups (Jason Schwartzman), the meager millionaire with a meditation app that is hosting this weekend and Jeff (Ramy Youssef, who has still yet to say or do anything funny), the software engineer who wrote the very kind of fact-check guardrail software that Venis is rebelling against. During the weekend the group starts to get phone updates and news stories that the release of the app has caused so much misinformation that wide-spread worldwide chaos has broken out, martial law is being enacted, and the world is being destabilized. Using their own considerable wealth, access and technology, the 4 conspire about how to divide up the spoils of the new world.
That all sounds way more interesting than how Mountainhead actually plays out. It’s a dialog driven farce without any of the creatively vulgar barbs that made Succession such a scathing watch. In that show, every episode mattered. Every hour packed in monumental movements in the story. Nothing happens in Mountainhead. Before it becomes full-blown farce in the final act, it’s four guys sitting around on their phones theorizing about what parts of the world their own technology would be best to control. Like this year’s AI-antagonistic Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Armstrong takes a Lord of the Flies approach to the social media masses, wildly over-stating the influence of misinformation and the supposedly teetering state of societal breakdown that would occur without our tech giants and their government backchannels telling us all what’s real and what isn’t. In William Golding’s classic, mankind descends into a primitive by being robbed of all modern conveniences, in Armstrong’s version society burns to the ground without a PolitiFact fact check. It’s all so condescendingly stupid.
The film was rushed into production and wrapped in 6 months and boy does it show. It plays like a first draft, a jumble of big competing ideas that never come together. In typical Eat the Rich screenplay fashion, Armstrong portrays his rich oligarchs as being both a) evil and b) incompetent. Yes, the film’s moral compass fall down predictable politically correct racial lines so Ramy Youssef is the “voice of reason”, but he’s still useless so without a redeeming character in sight we watch these guys theoretically discuss world domination, and ultimately murder, in a matter of fact way that’s supposed to elicit a chuckle if Armstrong’s dialog was on point. They care more about spending their capital to acquire more power to show off that power than to use it for anything to benefit society. I get all that – it’s beat into us with all the subtlety of a bat wrapped in barb wire.
Then Mountainhead takes a radical detour in the third act. Instead of going into surreal, world-domination territory where these guys actually do war game the world from their house, they just decide to murder the lone dissenter. At which point it all turns into a bad Preston Sturges screwball comedy as the guys bumble and stumble and awkwardly try to carry out a murder in the most hands-off way possible, involving pillows, stairs, paper and gasoline.
It’s disappointing watching this movie go from high concept luxury satire to bumbling aimless and ultimately gutless comedy. It ends up saying nothing new, nothing daring and only going after the same old targets that movies are allowed to go after. A movie with a sharper script could have pulled it off. Before this I might have said Jesse Armstrong would be the guy to pull that off. But it also would have involved writing a second draft or punch it up a bit before shooting. Just a thought. Mountainhead is a movie about billionaires who don’t deserve their fame and fortune that was dashed out by a screenwriter half-assing out a junk script. Oh, the irony.