Film reviews: Greed | Like a Boss

Steve Coogan and Michael Winterbottom largely manage to balance finger-wagging with rib-tickling in Greed, which explores the life and business of an amoral billionaire. By Alistair Harkness.

Steve Coogan in Greed

Greed (15) ***


Like a Boss (15) **



The latest collaboration between Steve Coogan and director Michael Winterbottom (The Trip, 24 Hour Party People), Greed takes a paw-swipe at the insidious effects of wealth inequality via a satirical portrait of the rise-and-fall of a British high-street tycoon as he celebrates his 60th birthday with a display of Roman-themed 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 orange-skinned, 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 shop-assistants or the many sweatshop workers whose already pitiful wages he keeps driving down in his ongoing quest to cut the cost of outsourcing. About to be scrutinised by a House of Commons select committee investigation into his business affairs, Richard’s birthday celebrations – inspired by his misguided love of the movie Gladiator – are really an elaborate PR stunt designed to distract attention from the parliamentary investigation and dazzle those members of the tabloid-reading public who aspire to his lifestyle via reality shows of the sort Richard’s feckless daughter is currently involved in.


Richard has tasked his team of underlings with making the celebrations happen while sparing every expense they can, something that doesn’t bode well given a lion has also been sourced to make his plywood recreation of the Colosseum an authentic a homage to Gladiator (someone does point out to him that Gladiator featured Russell Crowe fighting tigers not lions). But he’s also hired a timid hack (David Mitchell) to ghostwrite his biography and the latter’s gentle probing into Richard’s ascendency reveals the extent to which his behaviour has been normalised in a world that idolises the free market to the detriment of other people’s well-being.


Here, Winterbottom and Coogan are generally skilled at combining finger-wagging with rib-tickling, nowhere more so than when Richard’s party encounters a group of (real) Syrian refugees. At first their presence on the beach outside his hotel is an eyesore he worries will bum out his celebrity guests, but soon enough they become awkward participants in a moment of manufactured compassion on his daughter’s reality show and, inevitably, a source of cheap labour when the Bulgarian crew Richard’s team have hired to undercut the locals quit over a pay dispute. 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 Coldplay’s Chris Martin and Stephen Fry.


And yet the film also feels a little scattershot in its targets and approach. The 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, bobble-heading 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 schoolboy 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 given they’re the same age in real life. For all its flaws, though, the film does build to an amusingly dark ending, taking a turn into Greek tragedy but never letting us forget the extent to which the rapacious pursuit of profit tarnishes everything.


As the break-out star of 2017 hit Girls Trip, Tiffany Haddish deserves a comedy vehicle to match her talents. Like a Boss is not 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 here. 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 reverse-engineered from Seth Rogen films. Even on the gender-switched gross-out front (and much of the humour falls into this category), it doesn’t understand that crudity isn’t a substitute for characterisation or that filling a film with broad stereotypes should be the first not the final step in a comedy about two women whose path to success is predicated on subverting expectations. Salma Hayek co-stars.