• Release year: 2025
• Director: Wes Anderson.
• Producers: Wes Anderson, Jeremy Dawson, John Peet, and Steven Rales.
• Screenplay by: Wes Anderson.
• Cinematography by: Bruno Delbonnel.
• Music by: Alexandre Desplat.

Shotgun Commentary: one of the most dense Wes Anderson films you can watch.

Review

The Phoenician Scheme is Wes Anderson’s latest feature. A movie with a great cast, as one expects from an Anderson film, but a story that feels lacking at best. The movie promises to be controversial, as not all fans of the director will want to face the truth: the storytelling and the pace are embarrassingly off.

Context

The film follows a rich businessman, Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), who recruits his daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) to help him with a scheme. His intention is to have her inherit all of his possessions, so he wants to make sure that she is properly trained to manage them.

Soon, you learn that there is a big funding gap in his great master plan. To cover it, father and daughter go around negotiating with his main investors for money. In the most Anderson fashion, every character they encounter, and themselves, are quirky and unique in their own different way, all of them with that robotic quality that characterises the director’s style.

Plane crash

Why is it off then? You might be wondering. Well, the best way to tell if it is going to get tedious for you or not is the initial credits. Does four minutes of a single shot of a man bathing feel boring? If the answer is yes, this might not be the movie for you. If you feel like going on a rant about why that shot is so beautiful and all the tiny details are so telling, there might just be hope for you.

Despite an academic and professional background in cinema, this critic is of the first group. As such, the cold mantel of impending boredom could be felt during that scene. A chill that disappeared during roughly the first two thirds of the film, but came back with a vengeance the moment Scarlett Johansson’s segment hits the screen.

Anderson’s films are well-known for their aesthetics. The symmetry, pastel colours and camera movements create a whimsical atmosphere that serves as a buffer for the bittersweet tales that the director favours.

Sadly, not even the beautiful imagery is capable of making the third act of the film entertaining. In fact, not even Scarlett Johansson, Benicio del Toro and Benedict Cumberbatch together are able to save it, which, in a way, it is a feat on its own, albeit not for the right reasons.

The highlights

Still, not everything is bad news. The characters themselves are fabulous, both physically and mentally. Richard Ayoade as Sergio, leader of the Radical Freedom Militia Corps, is absolutely delightful. Every appearance is hilarious and adds the exact amount of awkward insanity that the film needs to maintain the audience’s attention.

The other highlight is, of course, Liesl. Not the character per se, but the visual presentation of it. The heiress of Korda’s fortune is the aloof smoker type that is so often portrayed in Anderson’s work. So, in that sense, her appeal is that of an old raggedy blanket, it will do the job, but there is nothing new or interesting about it, no matter how well Threapleton portrays her.

However, she changes her appearance as she enters her father’s world more and abandons that of the faith in which she was brought up. Her trip to the land of the moral grays presented in the form of makeup, green tights, drinking and smoking.

All in all, The Phoenician Scheme is a painfully average movie from a director that bears the curse of expectation. Had this feature been made by anyone else, it could be regarded as pretty okay. Sadly, both the writers and the cast promise a lot more than it is delivered in this Phoenician scam.

Thanks to Universal for big-screen access! The Phoenician Scheme will be released the 23st of May.

Advice to take from this movie:

• Never trust an entomologist.
• A great cast can’t save a train wreck.
• No matter how beautiful, perfectly curated films can also get boring.

What’s your take? Have you watched The Phoenician Scheme? Don’t hesitate to let me know your thoughts in the comments section below, or leave a message in my contact page! For more reviews and cinema-related articles, check out the rest of my blog! 😀