Greed

Name: Greed
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Released: February 28, 2020
Duration: 104 min
Rating: 52
Cast: Asa Butterfield, Asim Chaudhry, Charlie Cooper, David Mitchell, Dinita Gohil

2020

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Mixed or average reviews based on 32 Critic Reviews

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Mixed or average reviews based on 15 Ratings

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5.7	User Score Mixed or average reviews based on 15 Ratings

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Greed: Pay What I Have To

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Movie Details & Credits

Sony Pictures Classics | Release Date: February 28, 2020 | R

Starring: Asa Butterfield, Asim Chaudhry, Charlie Cooper, David Mitchell, Dinita Gohil, Enzo Cilenti, Isla Fisher, Jamie Blackley, Jonny Sweet, Pearl Mackie, Sarah Solemani, Shanina Shaik, Shirley Henderson, Sophie Cookson, Stephen Fry, Steve Coogan, Will Smith

Summary: Self-made British billionaire Sir Richard McCreadie's (Steve Coogan) retail empire is in crisis. For 30 years he has ruled the world of retail fashion – bringing the high street to the catwalk and the catwalk to the high street – but after a damaging public inquiry, his image is tarnished. To save his reputation, he decides to bounce backSelf-made British billionaire Sir Richard McCreadie's (Steve Coogan) retail empire is in crisis. For 30 years he has ruled the world of retail fashion – bringing the high street to the catwalk and the catwalk to the high street – but after a damaging public inquiry, his image is tarnished. To save his reputation, he decides to bounce back with a highly publicized and extravagant party celebrating his 60th birthday on the Greek island of Mykonos. … Expand

Director: Michael Winterbottom

Genre(s): Drama, Comedy

Rating: R

Runtime: 104 min

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Critic Reviews

Gary Goldstein

Feb 27, 2020

Coalesces into a thoughtful, pointed, at times deceptively profound look at how the rich get richer and, well, you know what happens to the poor. Read full review

Nathalie Atkinson

Mar 4, 2020

Greed’s antihero is known as “Rich" to his intimates and his surname earns him the moniker “greedy McCreadie.” It’s not subtle stuff but then, investigative journalism, censure, documentary exposés, and empathy haven’t worked so far to cure our rapacious fast-fashion appetite – so why not a movie? Read full review

The Film Stage Mark Asch

Sep 12, 2019

A film casting stones at excess, Greed is hardly without sin itself. Read full review

Empire Nick de Semlyen

Feb 20, 2020

Like Maximus, the hero who inspires the theme of its pivotal party, Greed will keep you entertained. But patchiness and occasional preachiness mar a clearly heartfelt message movie. Read full review

Marjorie Baumgarten

Mar 4, 2020

Despite the bright spots of humor provided by the film’s game actors, Greed chintzes on unexpected barbs. Its satire hits every target but the film never aims at anything that doesn’t already have a giant target on its back. Read full review

Vikram Murthi

Feb 26, 2020

Greed fails because it’s overstuffed with subplots and organized via a maddening time-hopping structure. Read full review

Joe Morgenstern

Feb 27, 2020

The film isn’t funny at all. It’s so didactic and dislikable that it took me a while to realize humor wasn’t its main goal. Read full review

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Bertaut1

Mar 2, 2020

A savage and hilarious satire

We live in an era where wealth is distributed upwards and the gap between the haves and have-nots has become wider than ever. According to inequality.org, the richest 1% of the world's population controls 45% of global wealth, whilst the poorest 64% of theA savage and hilarious satire

We live in an era where wealth is distributed upwards and the gap between the haves and have-nots has become wider than ever. According to inequality.org, the richest 1% of the world's population controls 45% of global wealth, whilst the poorest 64% of the population control less than 1% of the wealth. In 2018, Oxfam reported that the wealth of the 26 richest people in the world was equal to the combined wealth of the 3.5 billion poorest people. This is the milieu of Greed, a hilarious satire from prolific genre-hopping writer/director Michael Winterbottom. Examining how the rich get richer, the film focuses on a successful British clothing entrepreneur, and its bread and butter is the concomitant grotesquery that results when an individual has the same wealth as a small country. Mixing send-up and satire with more serious socio-economic points, Greed doesn't really do or say a huge amount that hasn't been done or said before, but it's entertaining, amusing, and undeniably relevant.

Sir Richard McCreadie (Steve Coogan) is one of Britain's richest men. The perma-tanned "self-made" billionaire is the owner of several clothing chains and is known as "the King of the High Street", although a less complimentary nickname is "Greedy" McCreadie. On the Greek island of Mykonos, the final (chaotic) touches are being put to McCreadie's Roman-themed 60th birthday bash – complete with mandatory togas, a fake coliseum, and a real, albeit somnolent, lion. Much of the story is told through the lens of McCreadie's "official biographer" Nick (David Mitchell), a classically-trained literature buff who drops quotes from Shakespeare and Shelley into everyday conversation, and who hates himself for agreeing to write a fawning celebration of McCreadie.

The idea that a billionaire could be so cut off from workaday reality as to stage a Roman-themed birthday party on a Greek island may sound far too on the nose, too ridiculously hubristic to say anything of any worth, too over-the-top to even function as satire. However, McCreadie is based on Sir Philip Green, chairman of the Arcadia Group, avoider of taxes, exploiter of the working-class, asset-stripper, and enemy of the #MeToo movement. Similarly, many of the details of McCreadie's ludicrous birthday are lifted verbatim from Green's very real 50th birthday celebrations in 2002 – when he flew 219 guests to Cyprus for a three-day toga party.

McCreadie, of course, is a hilariously despicable slimeball, a man who unironically feels hard done by when Syrian refugees show up on the (public) beach he's using for his birthday, and Coogan portrays him as not only narcissistic and void of conscience, but as a classless philistine – whereas Nick, for example, can quote Shakespeare and Shelley, McCreadie proudly gets his cultural know-how from BrainyQuote. However, for all his loathsomeness, McCreadie is a symbol for the system that gave rise to and sustains him; he's simply the result of an economy that takes from the poor and gives to the rich. For all his crass hubristic excess, McCreadie is neither an aberrant individual nor is he a criminal – he's a vulgar product of the system.

Aesthetically, the film employs a plethora of techniques, including non-linear editing, direct-to-camera addresses, YouTube videos to provide exposition, split-screen, fake news footage, and title cards. However, it's at its most effective when at its simplest, particularly in scenes involving the wonderful Dinita Gohil as Amanda, McCreadie's overworked PA. Her interactions with Nick provide the emotional core of the story, and their scenes are all simple shot/counter-shot editing and blocking. And by far the film's best sequence, which comes towards the end, is another simple setup involving Amanda and McCreadie, wherein the scene tells its story not through aesthetic bombast or even dialogue, but through the expression on Gohil's face. It's the moment during which Winterbottom drops all pretence of comedy and focuses on the more serious issues that have hovered at the fringes since the opening seconds.

If I were to focus on any one problem, it would be two underdeveloped subplots. A (staged) reality TV show subplot involving McCreadie's daughter Lily (Sophie Cookson) provides for some very funny individual moments, but it contributes nothing whatsoever to the main plot. Additionally, the fact that McCreadie and his ex-wife Samantha (Isla Fisher) are still in love with one another is a theme which never really goes anywhere, which is a shame, as it could have provided some much-needed character development for her and some shades of grey for him.

For better or worse, we live in an age where there are more billionaires than ever before, and Greed is a comedy about the excess and disconnect of such people. However, so too is it a cautionary tale, a reminder that just because we're removed from exploitation doesn't mean such exploitation isn't happening.… Expand