Greed (2019)

Greed is comedy which tells the fictional story of a billionaire who is trying to throw a ridiculous party to show how wealthy he is. The story is told partly in flashback building up how Richard McCreadle (Coogan) goes from public schoolboy to King of the High Street. The film was suppose to be a comedy but NOBODY laughed and the week before I saw Parasite and people laughed multiple times and there were more people in this screening.

There is a thread where one of the children is in a reality TV programme. The fact it’s in the film shows that it’s current because reality shows are popular but I don’t think it will age well. The only good part about this particular thread is that former Doctor Who companion Pearl Mackie appears in this which got my attention.

I thought that Steve Coogan was quite good as Sir Richard McCreadle who is playing a charicature of a certain billionaire and there is quite a lot of Coogan’s other characters in the movie but I just didn’t connect to the character. When McCreadle got killed by a lion, I found it amusing but not much beyond that. I was distracted by Coogan’s teeth. I thought that David Mitchell was quite good in this. He plays the person who is writing the book on McCreadle and he seems like the most normal person in the entire film. He is tasked with making someone loathsome seem like a nice guy. 

I haven’t seen any films featuring Isla Fisher. She appears in films that I don’t really have any interest in seeing but I have to say that I thought she was quite good as the wife/ex-wife of McCreadle. She seems to like him but they aren’t in love and she gets to make a few digs about Richard. She does provide the right kind of humour. The film features a lot of people from the British comedy world so its an interesting query about how well this film will do out of the UK. 

It turns into a PowerPoint presentation at the end which felt like I was being lectured at. I understand why they put the stats in and they are shocking but I think that it wasn’t done in the right way and that’s my overall issue with this film. It felt it could have been handle a bit better. I was surprised that the people playing the refugees on the beach were actual refugees but by the end of the film I just found myself being slightly numbed by it. It’s not terrible but it lacks the killer punch that this film should have had.