Greed (15)
Verdict: Tycoon lampooned
Like A Boss (15)
Rating: 
Verdict: Slick and soulless
The main emotion when you leave the cinema at the end of Greed might well be surprise that there’s not a posse of lawyers running in with an injunction on behalf of billionaire Sir Philip Green.
The film’s star, Steve Coogan, and its writer-director Michael Winterbottom, have made a few noises about Green, the former BHS boss, being only one of several inspirations for Coogan’s character, a charismatic, but coarse, High-Street fashion mogul called Sir Richard McCreadie.
But you won’t be fooled for a second.
The tycoon, once celebrated as a titan of retail commerce, has suffered a series of major blows to his reputation since Parliament started scrutinising his questionable business ethics, his asset-stripping, his tax avoidance
When ‘Greedy’ McCreadie, as the tabloids call him, appears before a parliamentary select committee, he even orders one of the MPs to stop staring at him.
That’s a gem lifted directly from Green’s playbook, and there are many more.
If there’s a broader context, it’s only that the film uses Green — sorry, McCreadie — to satirise the way in which ‘international fashion brands’ rack up massive profits on the backs, more or less literally, of Third World sweatshop workers.
But the story is driven by the preparations for McCreadie’s outrageously ostentatious 60th birthday bash — themed on his favourite movie, Gladiator — on the Greek island of Mykonos.
The tycoon, once celebrated as a titan of retail commerce, has suffered a series of major blows to his reputation since Parliament started scrutinising his questionable business ethics, his asset-stripping, his tax avoidance.
To his fury, some A-list celebrities declare that they will no longer attend his party.
An assistant (Sarah Solemani) passes on the unwelcome news that ‘Angelina’s definitely not coming and Rihanna’s now a maybe’.
‘Leo’ has sent his apologies, too, although another kind of leo — a lion, hired to replicate the colosseum scene — ends up making its presence very much felt.
Keith Richards doesn’t cry off — after all, he’s getting $800,000 to attend. But McCreadie is furious when he learns that the Rolling Stone is running late.
The main emotion when you leave the cinema at the end of Greed might well be surprise that there’s not a posse of lawyers running in with an injunction on behalf of billionaire Sir Philip Green
‘I’m paying him a dollar a wrinkle,’ he rages. ‘Tell him I want him here in an hour, grinning like a tramp who’s won the lottery, which is basically what he is.’
There are plenty of chucklesome lines like that in Greed, and Winterbottom extracts as much fun as possible from the phenomenon of mega-rich patrons shelling out for private concerts.
A flashback whisks us to the preparations for a 40th birthday party for his first wife Samantha (Isla Fisher).
McCreadie is indignant to learn that Robbie Williams will cost him the same as Elton John — a million dollars. Tom Jones is a bargain at $350,000.
How much of this is based on keenly-researched fact, and how much is mischievous whimsy, is hard to say. Coogan’s portrayal of McCreadie as a perma-tanned bully with dazzling, over-whitened teeth is certainly over the top — but not, perhaps, by much.
Other flashbacks take us to his schooldays, to the parliamentary hearing, to the early stages of his empire-building. We see him haranguing a hapless manager of one of his downmarket High Street shops, Xcellent.
We also find him wooing Samantha, by hiring James Blunt to serenade her outside their bedroom window.
Colin Firth, Keira Knightley, Ben Stiller, Chris Martin and Stephen Fry gamely offer further little cameos.
The story is driven by the preparations for McCreadie’s outrageously ostentatious 60th birthday bash — themed on his favourite movie, Gladiator — on the Greek island of Mykonos
Mind you, it’s almost worth a tangential satire on its own, how ready the stars themselves are to contribute to the mockery of a once-lionised public figure, now that it’s safe to do so.
The devices Winterbottom uses to knock some narrative shape into all this come in two forms: David Mitchell plays a diffident journalist hired to write McCreadie’s authorised life story, while Dinita Gohil is one of his entourage, whose own relatives work in his sweatshops back in Sri Lanka.
With Shirley Henderson sparkling as his proud Northern Irish mother, Asa Butterfield as his aggrieved son, and Sophie Cookson playing his daughter as an aspiring Made In Chelsea-type reality TV star, there is much to entertain us, yet in a way that’s the film’s weakness more than its strength.
The comedy is too scattershot, trying to hit too many targets at the same time. We get how appallingly decadent McCreadie and his chums are without a further reminder in the shape of Syrian refugees camped on the beach in Mykonos, whom he tricks into working to build his birthday amphitheatre.
Satire loses its edge when it becomes a lampoon, and that’s what happens in Greed.
Moreover, the po-faced statistics that play over the closing credits, about the disparity between the world’s super-rich and its mega-poor, seem a bit wincingly self-righteous given all the knockabout silliness that has gone before.
None of that should discourage you from seeing it, though. I can practically guarantee that you will laugh.
I have no such confidence in Like A Boss, which is also set in the dog-eat-dog world of retail.
Rose Byrne and Tiffany Haddish play Mel and Mia — business partners, best friends and housemates, so devoted to one another that in the morning they load each other’s toothbrushes with toothpaste.
Theirs is one of those implausible relationships that only exist in the movies; their banter feels precision-tooled by teams of white-coated giggle-makers in a film-formula factory somewhere.
The premise is that together they run an Atlanta cosmetics company, but it’s losing money, and the only way to survive is to sell a major stake to rapacious make-up mogul Claire Luna (a hammy Salma Hayek).
The rotter then plots to diddle them out of the business altogether, but naturally gets her comeuppance.
Haddish and Byrne are accomplished comic actresses: the latter more than proved her worth in Bridesmaids (2011), and that is clearly the kind of bawdy sisterhood comedy for which director Miguel Arteta is striving here.
Alas, not even they can redeem a film that, despite a few amusing moments, is just as slick as its thumping pop soundtrack, and just as soulless.
Even kids will smell a rat in Ford’s shaggy dog story…
Rose Byrne and Tiffany Haddish play Mel and Mia — business partners, best friends and housemates, so devoted to one another that in the morning they load each other’s toothbrushes with toothpaste. The pair are pictured together
The Call Of The Wild (12A)
Rating: 
Verdict: A paw substitute
Jack London’s 1903 novel The Call Of The Wild, about the adventures of a dog called Buck during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush, has inspired filmmakers for the best part of a century.
There was a silent version, and one with Clark Gable and Loretta Young, and another with Charlton Heston.
And here we are once more, with a cast led by Harrison Ford (below), no less. But this time, instead of an actual dog playing Buck, we get motion-capture actor Terry Notary.
In the acclaimed 2017 Swedish film The Square, Notary was responsible for one of the most startling spectacles I’ve ever seen on screen, as a man doing an ape impression and terrorising a room full of people at a black-tie dinner.
Buck is a heck of a dog. Unfortunately, the only challenge he doesn’t quite pull off is to persuade us that he actually is one
He does a great job as a dog, too, but for all the wizardry of motion-capture technology, even young children will smell a rat.
Still, they’ll enjoy this shaggy dog story, which begins when Buck, an exuberant St Bernard/Scotch collie cross, is stolen from the home of a kindly judge (Bradley Whitford) by thieves who have heard there’s a market up in the Yukon for hounds big and strong enough to pull sleds.
He then gets passed from owner to owner, some kindly and others cruel, ending up in the care of Ford’s grizzled, grieving frontiersman, John Thornton.
Or is Buck the carer, saving John from nasty gold prospector (Dan Stevens, giving a performance that even the average pantomime villain might consider a tad over the top) and even addressing his alcohol problem, like a canine AA counsellor?
Either way, Buck is a heck of a dog. Unfortunately, the only challenge he doesn’t quite pull off is to persuade us that he actually is one.
The day of the triffids was never this dull
Little Joe (12A)
Rating:
Verdict: Will make you wilt
Austrian director Jessica Hausner’s film has had oodles of critical praise on the festival circuit, and at Cannes last year, where I first saw it, Emily Beecham won the Best Actress prize.
She’s a fine actress, but I don’t know how she so impressed jurors. It’s a weird performance and this is a weird picture, with odd, discordant music to represent the strange goings-on and an over-designed set dominated by yellows, greens and oranges, as if the movie were sponsored by what some of us still fondly think of as Opal Fruits.
It’s billed as science-fiction horror. Well, there’s certainly plenty of ‘sci’ — not many films reference ‘the olfactory pathway to the limbic system’.
Alice is a cold fish, but let’s not bring fish into it, too. The plant, which she names Little Joe, seems to have the power to make even her happy, but it also has sinister properties
There’s lots of ‘fi’, too, in a story about plant life getting the better of human-beings.
But it’s entirely devoid of scares and there’s not even much in the way of tension, as an introspective scientist called Alice (Beecham) takes home one of the genetically-engineered plants she is raising in a lab and gives it to her young son Joe (Kit Connor) to nurture.
There is something in the pollen of these plants that seems to make human beings happy, and the idea is that Alice and her team will go on to produce them commercially.
Alice is a cold fish, but let’s not bring fish into it, too. The plant, which she names Little Joe, seems to have the power to make even her happy, but it also has sinister properties.
There are faint echoes of The Day Of The Triffids, and for that matter faint echoes of a compelling film trying to get out. But despite the presence of Ben Whishaw, as Alice’s lovelorn colleague, and Lindsay Duncan as a psychotherapist, I’m afraid it never does.
In fact, far from making me happy, Little Joe just made me tired. I can just about remember enough O-Level biology to recall the difference between chlorophyll and chloroform, but this dreary picture rather blurs the distinction.