Joker: Folie a Deux - A Review: It’s a Mad, Mad World

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. But be forewarned, this is an aggressively arthouse movie that will be very unappealing to those seeking comic book entertainment.  

 Joker: Folie a Deux is director Todd Philips’ sequel to his controversial, billion-dollar blockbuster Joker (2019), and features Joaquin Phoenix reprising his iconic, Oscar-winning role as Arthur Fleck aka Joker, but this time he’s joined by Lady Gaga as his love interest Harley Quinn.

Joker was, and still is, an extraordinarily polarizing film. Back in the hyper-politicized year of 2019, Joker was instantly reviled by weak-kneed critics who labeled Phoenix’s Fleck/Joker as the “patron saint of incels”, and the film vile and potentially violence inducing because it captured the anger and resentment boiling just under the surface of America.

Despite the cavalcade of establishment media fear and loathing of Joker, the film still managed to make gobs of money and garner eleven Academy Award nominations and two wins (Best Actor and Best Original Score).

Unfortunately, no one need fear Joker: Folie a Deux becoming a blockbuster or hording trophies at the Academy Awards. Joker: Folie a Deux is going to be a certified box office bomb and is despised by critics and fans alike.

I try to quarantine myself from reviews and criticisms of a film before seeing it, but with Joker Folie a Deux it was impossible to avoid the overwhelming hate the film was receiving. Some of the most animated vitriol toward the film was coming from people who, like me, loved the original movie.

So when I strolled into an empty Sunday afternoon screening of Joker: Folie a Deux, I was mentally sharpening my knives in order to be able to properly and precisely eviscerate the shitshow I was about to watch.

But then I watched it…and maybe it was because I went in with such low expectations, but not only did I like Joker: Folie a Deux, I thought it was, in a way, much like the first film, bleak but utterly and absolutely brilliant.

The film opens with a Looney Tunes style cartoon which features Arthur Fleck and his literal and figurative shadow, Joker. This opening gives the perfect psychological backdrop for Fleck/Joker and buttresses my Jungian shadow thesis regarding Joker where Arthur Fleck is a Christ-figure and Joker is the anti-Christ/Satan figure.

The film then goes to live action and the story begins where Joker left off, with the now famous Arthur Fleck sitting in Arkham Asylum awaiting his trial for murder.

Over time the film descends into the madness of Arthur Fleck…and uses the genre of a jukebox musical as a manifestation of that madness. So as reality and fantasy blend together in Arthur’s mind, he and his friend Lee Quinzel – aka Harley Quinn, played by Lady Gaga, sing a bevy of American Standards…it’s sort of like a grotesque fever dream/nightmare version of La La Land.

But make absolutely no mistake, Joker: Folie a Deux is not, and is not meant to be, “entertaining”, not in the traditional sense, but it is most certainly enlightening and insightful, something which is exceedingly rare in cinema nowadays, most especially in Hollywood films in general, and franchise movies in particular.  

Joker: Folie a Deux is a work of art, which is a jarring and frustrating thing for viewers to experience when they head into the cinema expecting a franchise film piece of pop entertainment. This subverting of expectation, signified in the film with the recurring theme of “That’s Entertainment!”, is no doubt responsible for the film’s very poor reception among audiences and critics that have been conditioned by Marvel’s mindless money-making machine movies over the last 16 years…and to a lesser extent DC’s too, to expect a certain kind of pre-teen drivel as comic book cinema.

Joker: Folie a Deux is not that, instead it is a relentlessly bleak and brutal film. It is grungy, gruesome and glorious. It may make you angry, it may make you anxious, it may make you bored. But whatever your reaction to it is, that says infinitely more about you than about it, because this movie is a mirror held up to our insane, inane, indecent cancer of a culture and the vicious and vacuous world we all inhabit. Your reaction to Joker: Folkie a Deux, is your reaction to the madness of our broken and fallen world.

It seems obvious to me that Joker: Folie a Deux is director Todd Phillips’ giant middle-finger to the people who hated the first movie…and to those that loved it too. I never would’ve guessed that Todd Phillips of all people – the guy who made the Hangover trilogy, would be the auteur with balls the size of Hindenbergs who morphs into his main character, lights the match and watches the whole shithouse go up in flames. But here we are…and I’m glad to be here.

The animating characteristic of Joker: Folie a Deux is despair. Phillips’ Gotham is a hellscape…literally. For not only is it filled with vile, venal and loathsome creatures, but it is entirely devoid of any love. In a world devoid of love, despair rules the day because hope is replaced by delusion.

Arthur Fleck is, as a Christ figure, an open wound, a raw nerve, and it isn’t the hate of this world that affects him so greatly, but rather the complete absence of love.

Joker, on the other hand, as the devil, thrives in this hell for the exact reason that it cripples Arthur.

Many critics and hipsters hated the first Joker movie because Arthur Fleck was a white guy. This sort of shallow, identity driven thinking is all too common in our current age, and it reduces otherwise smart people into myopic fools unable to see the forest for the trees.

Arthur Fleck isn’t a symbol of white disenfrachisement…he is a symbol of the forgotten, the downtrodden, the outcast, and the loser of all colors, creeds and genders.

Arthur Fleck is the shaking, orphaned child in Gaza surviving in the rubble. He is the Palestinian prisoner gang-raped by his Israeli guards. He is the gay man thrown from a roof in Saudi Arabia. He is the teenage girl in Kabul beaten for showing her face. He is the black boy abused and neglected by an overwhelmed foster care system. He is Kelly Thomas, the mentally ill homeless man beaten to death by police in California. He is Ethan Saylor, the young man with Down’s Syndrome who died when Maryland cops kneeled on his neck in a movie theatre. Arthur Fleck is the helpless and the hopeless, the weak, the sick and the old…and critics and audiences who see him as a threat or a symbol of the oppressor simply due to the color of his skin and his gender are the ones who make this world the cruel, inhumane and uninhabitable shithole that it is.  

Joker is Arthur’s shadow…he is his vengeance and justice. Joker is the Hamas member slaughtering Israeli men, women and children at a desert rave. Joker is the Israeli soldier executing Palestinian men, women and children in cold blood. Joker is the cop killing pets in front of children. Joker is the school-shooter settling scores for social slights. Joker is the mayhem, murder and madness unleashed by those who feel fueled by righteousness.

Joker is the king of this fallen world…and Arthur Fleck is its victim.

Joaquin Phoenix is once again fantastic as Arthur and the Joker. Phoenix is a fragile yet forceful screen presence. His transformations throughout Joker: Folie a Deux are subtle and simply spectacular. I doubt Phoenix will be considered for any awards since Joker: Folie a Deux is so hated, but he is more than worthy of accolades.

Lady Gaga is an actress I have never been able to tolerate. I despised the trite and treacly A Star is Born and found her distractingly bad in House of Gucci.  But here in Joker: Folie a Deux I finally got to understand her appeal. There really is just something about her that is magnetic and undeniable, at least in this movie. I found her character arc to be somewhat poorly executed, but I thought her performance was quite good.

Brendan Gleeson plays a prison guard and is an ominous presence whenever he graces the screen, most particularly when he isn’t being menacing. Gleeson is, like Phoenix, one of the best actors on the planet, and he never fails to elevate any scene he inhabits.

And finally, Leigh Gill, who plays Gary Puddles, is fantastic in his lone scene. This scene, which features Puddles being questioned on the stand in court, is extraordinarily moving, and exquisitely captures the deeper meaning and purpose of the film.

Cinematographer Lawrence Sher, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on Joker, once again does phenomenal work on Joker: Folie a Deux. Sher shoots the film with a distinct 1970’s grittiness and grime. He turns multiple musical numbers into uncomfortable flashbacks to Sonny and Cher episodes or other seventies type showcases and does so with a cinematic aplomb.

Hildur Guonadottir, who won an Oscar for her original score on Joker, is back on this film and once again sets the scene with an uncomfortably menacing and ominous score that drives the emotional narrative.

As for Todd Phillips, as I previously said, it’s astonishing the balls on this guy. He is basically saying “fuck you” to critics and fans alike. It’s tough to imagine him bouncing back and being allowed to do a worthwhile film after having a critical and commercial flop like this. That’s a shame though because he has proven his worth as an artist with Joker and Joker: Folie a Deux.

Phillips is a lot of things, some of them good and some of them bad, but one thing that he has been in recent years…is right.

It’s always struck me that no one (except me) seemed to notice that Joker accurately diagnosed the incandescent anger and fury that was boiling just beneath the surface of America back in 2019. I wrote about this profoundly disturbing anger prior to Joker, but Joker showed it to mainstream audiences, and elite coastal critics were so horrified by it that they blamed the film rather than the country and culture it revealed.

Joker was proven right though as less than nine months after its release that volcano of anger erupted in Joker-esque fashion with the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing riots and chaotic violence in the streets of American cities…just like in Joker.

The Joker was every BLM rioter, and every opportunistic looter and arsonist in America’s summer of rage in 2020…just like he was every flag-waving MAGA moron on January 7th, 2021, who stormed the Capitol looking to “Save Democracy”.

That Joker was correct has never been admitted by the coastal elites who hated the movie. That Joker: Folie a Deux is also correct in diagnosing the unremitting cruelty, malignant madness and incessant insanity of our culture and country will also go unnoticed by those who are too offended, or bored or angry or inhumane to care or notice.

Joker: Folie a Deux is not a polarizing film like Joker. The consensus is that it is awful to the point of being an abomination. But I am here to tell you that Joker: Folie a Deux is a brutal, ballsy and brilliant film. It is, like Oliver Stone’s manic and maniacal 1994 masterpiece Natural Born Killers, well ahead of the curve, and will only get its due when the history of this era is written and the ugly truth of our current time fully revealed.

If you have the fortitude for it, and the philosophical, political and psychological mind for it, and the ability to tolerate the arthouse in your comic book cinema, then Joker: Folie a Deux is not the steaming pile of shit that critics and audiences claim it to be, but rather a startling revelation. And like most revelations it is reviled in its own time because it tells the unvarnished and unabashedly ugly truth that no one wants to see or hear because it’s too painful to ever acknowledge.

©2024

Ferrari: A Review - Despite a Bad Driver, Ferrari Wins the Race

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A solid biopic that features some subpar acting but also some fantastic racing sequences.

Ferrari, directed by Michael Mann and starring Adam Driver, is a biopic that tells the story of iconic Italian industrialist and race car manufacturer, Enzo Ferrari, as he navigates a series of tumultuous business and personal events in 1957.

Ferrari, which is written by Troy Kennedy Martin and is based on the book Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine by Brock Yates, is a strange film. The reason for this strangeness is that sometimes the sum of a film is never as good as the quality of its parts, but that is not the case in regards to Ferrari, which is somehow able to be considerably better than the individual pieces that make up its whole.

For example, you’d think for a biopic about a hard-charging, iconic Italian race car impresario you’d have to have a strong performance from the lead actor in the title role in order for the film to work. In the case of Ferrari, which stars Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari, the film works despite its lead actor, not because of him.

Driver is a mysterious actor in that it is an utter mystery to me why this insipid clod ever gets work, never mind works with great directors like Michael Mann and Martin Scorsese. As Enzo, a man juggling essentially two families, one with his wife and one with his girlfriend, and who is aggressively trying to have the greatest racing team in the world and maintain his auto business, the empty Driver feels like a kid playing dress up in his grandfather’s much too big suits. His ungodly awful, clownish Italian accent comes and goes like an engine missing the requisite sparkplugs, just like it did when Driver stumbled through the embarrassing Ridley Scott soap opera House of Gucci as another Italian titan of industry…Maurizio Gucci. Considering Driver’s artistic vacuity and acting vapidity, as well as his wandering parmesan cheese of an accent, and his insidiously shallow interpretations of characters, it seems to me the only iconic Italian he should ever be allowed to play is Chef Boyardee.

Another acting issue is Shailene Woodley, who is egregiously miscast as Lina Lardi, who is less Enzo’s gumar than she is his second wife and mother to his bastard son. Woodley gives a distractingly stilted and ineffective performance as Lina as she feels like she belongs in Malibu and not Molena.

The one saving grace regarding the acting is Penelope Cruz, who is absolutely brilliant as Enzo’s wife and business partner, Laura. There’s a scene early in the film where Laura visits her son’s grave and in the span of maybe thirty seconds Cruz, in close up, tells a wondrous and expansive story without saying a word. It’s a captivating and powerful piece of acting, and one that is heightened because Driver’s Enzo has a similar scene just prior to it that is nothing but verbosity filled with vacant histrionics.

Cruz is an actress that I rarely, if ever, think of, but her performance in Ferrari is yet another reminder for absent-minded dopes like me that she is among the most talented and skilled actresses in the world today.

Despite two of the three main performances being subpar, Ferrari pulls off the minor miracle of managing to be not just watchable but relentlessly compelling. A major reason for this is that the racing and driving scenes alone are worth the price of admission. Every racing scene is visceral, vital and undeniably electrifying. Mann and his cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt shoot the racing from innumerable ingenious angles with energetic camera movements that capture the dynamic thrill of the sport, and master editor Pietro Scalia splices it all together for the absolute maximum potency and power.

That said, some of the racing sequences can be a bit confusing, as the racing teams from Ferrari and Maserati have similar looks and coloring. But beyond that the racing is superb, and contrary to some reports I’ve read, I did not find the CGI to be distracting or second rate at all.

Michael Mann is an often-overlooked filmmaker who boasts a robust filmography which features a bevy of good and sometimes great movies. In recent years Mann’s output has slowed and diminished in quality, with Ferrari being his first film since 2015’s dismal Blackhat.

Mann’s films are inhabited by a particular type of tormented masculinity, where the protagonist is insatiably driven and must overcome the numerous obstacles placed in front of him as well as the internal burdens which haunt him .

Thief, Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, The Insider and Collateral are all top notch pieces of cinema that capture Mann’s storytelling and slick visual style across different genres….. but it is his 1995 masterpiece, Heat, which is the absolute apex of his filmmaking career. Heat is one of the best films of the last thirty years as it features the greatest bank robbery and shootout scene captured in the history of cinema, which is an astonishing accomplishment.

Ferrari is nowhere near the level of film as Heat, but it does represent a somewhat more mature piece of storytelling from Mann, that is not to say that Mann’s earlier work was adolescent, but to say that Ferrari captures a man (and Mann) growing old and dealing with the precipitous burdens of his age and station.

 It must also be said that Ferrari is also not as good as James Mangold’s brilliant 2019 film Ford v Ferrari, which Michael Mann Executive Produced. Ford v Ferrari is a better film across the board and features better racing sequences, but Ferrari is no slouch and is a quality piece of cinema in its own right. In fact, Ferrari would make a perfect companion piece to Mangold’s auto-racing masterpiece.

The bottom-line regarding Ferrari is that I was very pleasantly surprised to find it a thoroughly solid, utterly compelling, if flawed, piece of cinema despite the often-lackluster acting. I wholly encourage you to check it out in the theatre if possible, or on streaming when the time comes.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

8th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® Awards: 2021 Edition

Estimated Reading Time: 69 seconds

The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards are a tribute to the absolute worst that film and entertainment has to offer for the year. 2021 was a particularly heinous one for cinema, so the Slip-Me-A-Mickeys flourished in a very target rich environment.

Again, the qualifying rules are simple, I just had to have seen the film for it to be eligible. This means that at one point I had an interest in the film and put the effort in to see it, which may explain why I am so angry about it being awful. So any vitriol I may spew during this awards presentation shouldn't be taken personally by the people mentioned, it is really anger at myself for getting duped into watching.

The prizes are also pretty simple. The winners/losers receive nothing but my temporary scorn. If you are a winner/loser don't fret, because this years Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® loser/winner could always be next years Mickey™® winner!! Remember…you are only as good as your last film!!

Now…onto the awards!

 Worst Film of the Year

The Tender Bar – A boring, dramatically incoherent coming of age tale that makes an episode of The Wonder Years look like Lawrence of Arabia. George Clooney may be the very worst director making big time Hollywood movies. His butchery of this film is done with a chainsaw and not scalpel.  

Being the Ricardos – This cheesy, ham-handed Hollywood humping manages to turn Lucille ball and Desi Arnaz into the two dullest people in entertainment history.

Eternals – This is the worst Marvel movie I’ve ever seen and it isn’t even close. That is quite an accomplishment in cinematic futility.

Space Jam: A New Legacy – You know what would be fun…to put a legitimately moronic meathead who can barely speak a coherent sentence, LeBron James, on-screen with a bunch of corporate intellectual property and let them play basketball. Watching LeBron’s hairline recede is more entertaining.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® goes to…

Space Jam: A New Legacy – Hey, look at that, at least LeBron won something this year.

Worst Performance of the Year

LeBron James – Space Jam: A New Legacy - LeBron is a mental and moral midget, but he’s also got the charisma of a pile of week-old dog shit…so he’s got that going for him.

Benedict Cumberbatch – The Power of the Dog – Speaking of dog shit…Benedict Cumberbatch, or as my friend Dave calls him, Bend-her-dick Cunt-her-snatch, is supposed to be a menacing old-school cowboy in this movie, but from scene one he’s sashaying around like he’s working it on RuPaul’s runway. If they’d cast the cowboy from the Village People in this role it would’ve been less obviously gay.

Adam Driver – House of Gucci – Adam Driver is a giant, walking, talking anus. When you put him in Italian clothes, with Italian glasses, and have him speak with an Italian accent, he morphs into being a giant, walking, talking anus wearing Italian clothes and glasses, that has an Italian accent.

Jared Leto – House of Gucci – Leto’s performance in this movie makes Father Guido Sarducci look like Sir Laurence Olivier. A master class in awful acting.

Lady Gaga – House of Gucci – Gaga made me gag-gag with her wandering accent and hyper-theatrical posing in this dreadful movie. It is one of the great tragedies of human kind that Gaga now takes herself seriously as an actress.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® award goes to…

Jared Leto – Leto is the Leonardo da Vinci of awful over-acting.

Most Overrated Film of the Year

CODA – CODA is a Hallmark Channel movie that somehow won the Oscar for Best Picture. It is the worst film to win Best Picture in the history of the Academy Awards. The script is awful, the direction amateurish, the acting, including Troy Kotsur, is painful to watch. It also astonishes me that critics didn’t eviscerate this film but instead praised its soft-peddled, after school special bullshit.

The Power of the Dog – Jane Campion is a shitty director and this is a shitty movie. Arthouse fool’s gold that fooled a lot of people…but not me. Trite, vacuous, vapid and venal, this movie is poorly written, poorly directed, poorly acted and just all-around poor.

West Side Story – Steven Spielberg can make any movie he wants…and he made THIS piece of shit? If I want to watch dance teams square off in embarrassing street fights, I’ll just watch the original, better version of the story. An entirely useless exercise in historical cinematic revisionism.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® goes to…

CODA – I wish I was deaf and blind so I’d never have to see or hear about this stupid movie.

Worst Big Budget/Blockbuster/Action/Comedy of the Year

Eternals - See Above.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife – A terrific movie if you want to destroy a long-loved franchise with talentless teens and a terrible script.

Matrix: Resurrection – The Matrix was great. But literally every Matrix movie since the original has gotten worse by at 75%. This abysmal piece of shit puts the franchise deep into negative territory.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards goes to…

Eternals – This was a tough choice as these movies are all abysmal, but sitting through the two hour and thirty-six-minute woke slog that was Eternals was utterly excruciating to the point of torture.

Worst Director

George Clooney – Ironically, Clooney is on one of the most impressive runs of futility for a director since the Joel Schumacher heyday. Just when you think he can’t do any worse, he puts out The Tender Bar, and proves you wrong.

Aaron Sorkin – Sorkin proved last year with The Trial of the Chicago 7 that he was one of the worst directors of his generation, and he keeps the streak alive with Being the Ricardos.

Chloe Zhao – Zhao won an Oscar last year for Nomadland. This year she showed off what an incredibly shitty director she is with Eternals. Good for her.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® award goes to…

All three of these bags of shit. They’re all fucking terrible.

Special Achievement in Cinematic Malpractice

George Clooney – Clooney’s ability to continue to make one movie more awful than the last is a tribute to the endless supply of suck-ups and sycophants in Hollywood and to Clooney’s delusional sense of self. The shitshow that is The Tender Bar is a testament, and should stand as a monument, to the hackery of the ultimate Hollywood asshole...George Clooney.

POS Hall of Fame –

The Smith Family

At the 2015 Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards, the Smith family were voted to the Piece of Shit All-Stars. This year they’ve made the big leap to become Piece of Shit Hall of Famers!

Here’s a brief glimpse of what I wrote back at the 2015 Slip-Me-A-Mickey awards regarding the Smiths.

“This year we got to hear from Jada Pinkett-Smith how her husband was snubbed by the Academy Awards because he was black. We also got to hear how Jada was boycotting the Oscars in a show of solidarity with other snubbed black actors…which was convenient since she wasn't invited (as Chris Rock hilariously pointed out). I have one simple request for the entire Smith family...Will, Jada, Jaden and Willow…please shut the fuck up and go away forever. Will Smith is an abysmal hack of an actor and a dopey embarrassment as a "rapper". Jada Pinkett-Smith is a fly on the shit that is Will Smith, she desperately needs to bottle her manufactured self-righteous anger, stop talking immediately and vanish with her equally obnoxious other half. Jaden and Willow are kids, so they have an outside chance to not be as malignantly narcissistic as their God-awful parents, but I gotta be honest… it isn't looking very good as they aren't off to the best possible start in not following in their egotistical parents footsteps.”

Well, well, well, looks like I hit the nail on the head six years ago regarding the shitbag Smith family.

The truth is Will “Limp Willie” Smith has always been one of the biggest pieces of shit in Hollywood, and now with his slap of Chris Rock at the Oscars, everyone else gets to see the reality that I’ve known for a long time.

Will has been a piece of shit from day one. He is a bad joke as a rapper and his music has been an embarrassment for all sentient beings from the get-go. His acting career has also been an embarassment from day one. Will Smith is now and always has been a shitty rapper, shitty actor and shitty person. He is, undoubtedly, an incorrigle twat.

Speaking of twats, Will’s wife, Jada, is a talentless, narcissistic whore who’s done a wonderful job of making a cuckold out of her impotent and equally talentless husband by fucking her son’s friend August Alsina. She’s also a wondrous mother who has churned out two of the most repulsive spawn in Hollywood – no small task.

Jaden Smith, Will and Jada’s son, tweeted in the aftermath of Will’s slapping Chris Rock, “that’s how we do it”. Oh, really tough guy? Well Jaden, I invite you to don one of your signature skirts, and then go out into the real world with your toothpick arms, slap somebody, and see what happens to your non-binary ass. I know you don’t know this because you’re an entitled dandy who has never been around a real man in your entire life, but the real world ain’t the Oscars or the movies, and you’re going to find that out the hard way if you ever prance out of your privileged bubble, bitch.

One can only hope that the Smiths, who as individuals and as a collective family, are the most noxious, odious and malignant narcissists in all of Hollywood, a stunning achievement, are sentenced to a life of being in each other’s presence. They deserve that torture, and we deserve that reprieve.

Congratulation Will, Jada, Jaden and Willow, you’re all well-deserving members of the Piece of Shit Hall-of-Fame! Now kindly go fuck yourselves you rancid cunts.

And thus concludes another Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards. If you are one of the people who “won” this year I ask you to please not to take it personally and also to try and do better next year….because remember…this years Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® award winner could be next year’s Mickey™® Award winner!!which are the final awards show on the calender.

The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards are the final award show on the 2021 calender. That means that 2021, the most dreadful year in recent cinema history, is now, officially and not-so-mercifully, over. Thank the good lord….and I pray that 2022 saves us from the cinematic hell that was 2021. As always…I am not optimistic.

©2022

House of Gucci: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This star-studded, dramatically incoherent, big-budget soap opera isn’t so bad it’s good, it’s just really bad.

It is somewhat ironic that this Thanksgiving iconic director Ridley Scott has bestowed upon audiences an absolute turkey of a movie filled with an inexcusable and excessive amount of ham.

The turkey of a movie of which I speak is the remarkably ridiculous House of Gucci, and the ham is supplied by the cavalcade of over-acting movie stars among its cast, including Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Jared Leto, and Salma Hayek.

House of Gucci, which is currently only available in theatres, attempts to tell the based-on-a-true-story of the Gucci family fashion empire in the 1980’s into the 1990’s, particularly the courtship, then tumultuous marriage, between the heir to the Gucci throne, Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), and Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), a sexy and sassy daughter of a blue-collar trucking business impresario.

Maurizio’s family has mixed reactions to his marriage with the ever-ambitious and insistent Patrizia. Maurizio’s father, Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons), sees her as a social climber to be shunned. Rodolfo’s brother and business partner Aldo, sees Patrizia as a potential opportunity to gain more control over the family business by pulling Maurizio away from his father and over to him.  

House of Gucci starts off as somewhat of a misplaced love story, but then devolves into a sprawling and scattershot piece of corporate palace intrigue and capitalism porn.

The characters wear highly fashionable, gorgeous clothes, drive ludicrously fantastic cars and live in astonishingly lavish homes and high-rise apartments.

But all of this ostentatious display of wealth and beauty doesn’t give the characters any depth or dimension, nor does it conjure any genuine drama or aid in making the story coherent.

All it really does is make House of Gucci a very well-budgeted, high-end, melodramatic soap-opera.

I suppose the argument could be made that the vapid, vacuous and venal characters in the movie are meant to represent the fact that the decade featured in the film, the 1980’s, was the height of vapidity, vacuousness and venality, but I think that gives the film too much credit.

The movie doesn’t feel in on the joke of its empty campiness because it too frequently vacillates in tone from feverish fun to strenuous seriousness.

The most asinine irritating thing about the movie though is the obscene and absurd amount of over-acting in which the cast indulges.

Al Pacino and Jared Leto, the Ali and Frazier of over-acting, pull absolutely no punches in House of Gucci. These two bulls in the acting China shop chew more scenery than the pampered Gucci cows in bucolic Italian towns who provide the leather for over-priced handbags.

Leto, who is unrecognizable as the dim-witted Paolo Gucci – son of Aldo and cousin to Maurizio, is particularly awful, as his over-bearing Italian caricature makes Don Novello’s comic SNL character Father Guido Sarducci look like Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita.

Not to be outdone, Jeremy Irons brings his ham-fisted ‘A-game’ to keep up with his inane co-stars in this unbridled ham-fest. Irons is so completely committed to caricature his eyes look like Gucci sunglasses even on the rare occasions he isn’t wearing them.

But the queen of over-acting in House of Gucci is unquestionably Lady Gaga, who brings enough ham to the festivities to feed the world for the foreseeable future. Watching the thirsty Gaga, sporting a bizarre Transylvanian accent for some reason, pout and preen through a multitude of hair and costume changes like a cheap tart at a red-light street, but never once resemble an actual human being, is astonishing to behold.

Adam Driver avoids the over-acting bug, but he is terribly miscast in the film all the same, just like he was miscast in Scott’s The Last Duel. Driver, who looks like one of Dr. Frankenstein’s early discarded attempts, seems perpetually miscast to me, but maybe he isn’t miscast, maybe he’s just a bad actor.

Director Ridley Scott is one of the great filmmakers of his generation whose body of work includes such phenomenal films as Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, Blackhawk Down and Matchstick Men.

In comparison, House of Gucci feels like a very cheap Ridley Scott knock-off you could get from a street corner vendor for next to nothing.

Scott is now 83 years-old and the fact that House of Gucci is the second film he’s released this year along with The Last Duel, is utterly astonishing. It’s also unfortunate. Hopefully he’s able to make a few more quality films, like the flawed The Last Duel, in his golden years in order to get the rancid taste of House of Gucci out of movie-goers mouths.

I know you’re supposed to leave them laughing, but in the case of House of Gucci – which is sure to be a massive flop at the box office, it would feel like audiences are laughing at Ridley Scott and not with him as he nears the exit of his career, and that would be a tragedy for such a brilliant artist.

About an hour and a half into the two hour and thirty-seven-minute House of Gucci, in one of those rare moments where a film unintentionally tells the truth about itself, Adam Driver’s Maurizio sternly says to Lady Gaga’s Patrizia, “You’re humiliating yourself!”

My reaction to that dialogue was to nod and say aloud to myself in the very empty theatre where I saw the film, “I concur”. Everyone involved with this movie is humiliating themselves, myself included for having seen it.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

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