Maybe we were spoiled by the wild ride that was Barbarian, but I this film left me a bit unsatisfied. Now, as it's about a super-fancy restaurant that serves artsy-fartsy food, you might say that it would be genius if that was intentional. But somehow I don't think it is, and as an honest-to-goodness cheeseburger plays a key role at the end, and that's one of the parts that annoyed me the most, that sort of undercuts that notion. Mind you, it would have had to do a lot to make the premise, which in these days of White Lotus and Glass Onion, is getting a little hackneyed (rich people go off to island for fancy rich-person getaway/treat, things go awry), for it to succeed, and it just didn't have the ideas in the tank. It certainly starts fairly promisingly, and maintains tension in the slow build-up to the inevitable first spilling of blood, and Ralph Fiennes is his usual great self as the head chef/unhinged psychopath in charge,
and there were some blackly comic moments (although nothing to match Justin Long's basement-measuring antics in the afore-mentioned Barbarian) - my favorite being when a minor character who certainly doesn't seem to have done enough wrong to deserve death points that out, and Fienne's character asks: "Where did you go to college?" "Brown" "Student loans?" "...no..." "You're dying". But that is indeed a problem: we don't really know whether to root against the chef, whose final menu is to end with everyone (staff included) dying, or for him, because we're supposed to hate the customers. But not all of them are all that hateable, and, conversely, Anya Taylor-Joy's "Margot," our putative protagonist, isn't all that lovable (perhaps because "relatable" is not really in that actor's wheelhouse, what with her rather alien appearance and affect). Meanwhile, hardly any of the staff deserve their fate, not even the slavishly devoted (and unfortunately coiffed) Elsa (Hong Chau), who actually gets some of the best lines and is the most entertaining character.
(Nicholas Hoult's sycophantic foodie character could have taken that spot, but I don't think he's a particularly strong actor either, even though he had me laughing as often as anyone.) Of course, you could say I'm being naive in wanting black-and-white characters or a clear message, but several of the guests were such cardboard cutouts that the only way to defend the movie is as an allegory. And it seems to want to be that, what with the class warfare allusions, but then it ends up being just a bit too muddled. And the cheeseburger incident seems to be a mockery of the exquisite food up to that point, and that's a little cheap, too, particularly given the fact that the creator of that food dragged himself to the pinnacle of his profession from humble beginnings. Anyway, a missed opportunity: good buildup, but ran out of ideas, and failed to come up with clever enough backstories for the characters. (And what was the business with the allusions to Feinnes's chef's sexual harassment of a character who, despite ritualistically stabbing him with a fork as part of his penance, is nonetheless on board with his Jonestown-esque master plan? And the business of having the men run for it but not the women? Not to flog the culinary cliches too much, but half-baked.) I must say a lot made sense when I saw Adam McKay's name in the closing credits. Since the Big Short and continuing with Don't Look Up, he is not known for his subtle nuance. Still, another critic who didn't like the film compared it unfavorably with Godard's Weekend, and I hated that film a lot more. At least this film was never boring, and only the food was pretentious.
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