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Violence is in the air. Call it fate but in the same week Tom Cruise exits Mission Impossible, Wes Anderson of all people has made an action movie. The first scene of The Phoenician Scheme features an explosion on a private plane, a punch-up in the cockpit and ejection at high altitude. We haven’t even had the opening credits yet. Beyond them lie guns and grenades.
Aesthetes, rest easy. The presence of such things in what is still very much a Wes Anderson film lands, of course, as a wry inside joke. The year is 1950, as it often is with Anderson, and the hero of sorts is Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), a rogue tycoon of iffy morals and imperial reach. (The film mostly takes place in fictional Phoenicia: head east from the Balkans, keep on past Turkey.)
Korda is many-tentacled but also in danger. An anonymous rival is out for his blood in a deadly game of industrial espionage. Cue a brusque young nun, Liesl, played with stone-faced charisma by Mia Threapleton. She proves to be a long-lost daughter, helping her father through a whirl around his creditors as that unknown foe threatens both his business operations and his life.
Anderson has now been making films long enough that his female lead was only a year old when his career-defining family portrait The Royal Tenenbaums arrived in cinemas in 2001. So many precise compositional choices later, his style now only varies by fractions. For those who long ago wrote Anderson off as insufferably twee, it may not help to know that the new film co-stars Michael Cera as a lovestruck Norwegian school tutor in a spotted bowtie.
In fact, Cera is a giggle. So too del Toro and Threapleton. And the story has many likeable whimsies. Cinema is still more interesting for having Anderson making it. But a snag is hinted at by the supporting cast of stock players: Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray, Tom Hanks, Willem Dafoe. If you are now muttering a silent et cetera, the director may have thought the same. Too many characters and too much in general feels like an afterthought: a plane on autopilot. Watching the arch aggro of The Phoenician Scheme, you recall that life is indeed short.
The saving grace with Anderson can be lightly-worn depth amid the stationery-shop surfaces. Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t. Here, the movie has been sold as a tender tale of fathers and daughters. Hmm. It works better as a comedy of mid-century moguldom, though even then, the director could be gently obscuring his real area of interest.
History’s most famous Korda remains Alexander Korda, Hungarian-British producer of classic movies including The Third Man. That Korda used his clout to get all manner of wonderful visions realised. Using his name here seems telling. Might the character even be a fond nod to US billionaire Steven Rales, the publicity-shy co-founder of vast corporation Danaher? After all, Rales’s business fortune has been used for the most noble end possible — as Anderson’s own producer since 2007, ensuring this most particular of talents never need do anything so vulgar as make an actual action movie.
★★★☆☆
In UK cinemas from May 23 and US cinemas from May 30
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