
Who Wants to Murder a Billionaire?
dir: Paul Feig
2024
I thought I was watching the sequel to Idiocracy, but instead of critiquing what decades of neo-liberalism, curdled libertarianism and the dogma of ‘rugged individualism’ has wrought in the States, this cowardly film ends up celebrating it.
Imagine California years from now. Tent cities everywhere, human life is worth even less than today, streets awash in sewerage. Successive Trump governments have bankrupted the country, and the only way the government has to raise money is in an increasingly elevated lottery. No, it’s not a nod to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery; it’s something much dumber and far more shallow.
Instead of taking its cues from something intelligent or sensible, this flick turns The Purge concept into a comedy, but instead of one night a year being a free-for-all, for the day when the winner is announced, everyone can legally kill the winner and claim the billion dollar prize pool. In the unlikeliest twist on the premise, the murderers aren’t allowed to use guns, though.
Pfft. How un-American, but then California is different from the rest of the States.
This has been going on for a while, so, like when any new awful thing comes along, people adapt. People change according to what is perceived as being the new normal. They just accept that it’s fine.
The opening scene has a desperate yet grim lottery winner, Stiffler (Sean William Scott) running around LA avoiding all the people who are trying to kill him. And in terms of the people trying to kill him, it’s everyone. Grannies, baristas, barristers, everyone.
He saves himself for long enough and then ends up in a house where a grandma is looking after a baby. He done fucked up. Does he not recognise the great Philippino actress Dolly De Leon? She who played such a brutally central role in Triangle of Sadness a couple of years ago?
He should have known. It seems that the lottery is a bit rigged. Who knew that the government didn’t really want people to actually get the money?
It then jumps to our next victim, being Katie (Awkwafina), who has only just returned from interstate recently, and who didn’t read a single news article or update on her phone for ten years, so she’s unaware of anything to do with this monetary and government mandated madness at all.
You’d think an American state legalising murder for big bucks would be common knowledge worldwide, but perhaps we’re so thoroughly sick of their bullshit that it would just lead to us shrugging our shoulders and forgetting about it like every other nonsense thing they so passionately do, whether it’s to threaten to execute women who’ve had abortions or make it easier for idiots to shoot up pre-schools.
But I digress. Katie completely accidentally enters and wins the lottery, but she has no idea that she’s done so. So when all of LA start trying to kill her, it takes her a good long while to understand what’s going on.
A comically long time. Katie is not a fighter, but she is an actor who’s studied fake fighting, so she brings those desperate skills to the fore. So, virtually everyone is trying to kill her, but this isn’t that kind of flick. You’re thinking, ew, gruesome, but the flick mostly sticks to being a comical romp rather than a horrific one. A lot of choreography is done, and it’s, I think, deliberately not great, because story-wise it wouldn’t make that much sense if Katie is a Jackie Chan in disguise.
See, that’s the flick’s greatest hook and biggest flaw – it reminded me of the glorious 80s / 90s flicks where Jackie Chan and a whole roster of other stars did magnificent stunts, immaculate fight choreography and nearly killed themselves multiple times for our amusement, but it never really ever comes close.
It comes close enough a fair few times to remain entertaining. I guess. Out of nowhere, and this is that kind of flick where a lot of stuff happens out of nowhere, yet there’s a convenient and still somehow completely implausible explanation (she’s being followed by a drone, there’s a recording saying where she is, there’s a tracker on her phone until there isn’t) one rather huge dude appears tries to save her from the legions trying to kill her.
John Cena is who he is. I’m not going to apologise for him or explain his existence. I feel like, if you were to get into a conversation with someone, and you were trying to say “he’s actually good value, he’s capable of being pretty funny”, most people would look at you with that look reserved for people who talk dumb shit about vaccines or chemtrails. I don’t want to be that guy. But I will say that after I watched Cena in a series called Peacemaker, based on a bonkers DC character, I am prepared to cut him way more slack that the average human would.
He plays a guy called Noel who has tried to carve out a career for himself as someone who commits to protecting a winner for long enough that they claim their prize, with the expectation being that he gets a small percentage of the winnings. If you die he gets nothing, and if you live he gets a fraction.
It sounds like a solid proposition, but Katie doesn’t trust anyone, especially a guy she says looks like his face is an ear. She cannot believe that he wouldn’t just kill her himself, and she is very smart in thinking that.
She is, and I’m sorry to say this about a performer I like in something that I should have liked, not smart in almost anything else that she does. Because the flick is played for comedy, and is not a thriller or that violent an action flick, it never feels like they’re going to get her, and because she does all sorts of things as if to make it easier for people to kill her, it never really feels like there’s anything at stake. Three point six billion dollars is such a comically large sum of money that you can’t really compute it in your head, other than to think you’d never have to work again.
But in making people collectively lose their fucking minds, the set up, the premise, the flick itself doesn’t even condemn the people who are trying to murder Katie. Morally or otherwise, the flick contends that in the world we pretty much live in currently, people would happily slaughter each other for just the possibility of getting the lottery, let alone to actually get it. There’s something so tossed off about the whole idea that describing it as something even beneath the banality of evil doesn’t even come close.
Sure, people have their motivations, and the thing about Katie from the start is that she never opted in, she never felt the greed to get involved, and she’d give it all up to stop people trying to kill her, but then the flick never even really says “people doing all this shit are crazy and need to feel more connected to each other so that genocides can’t be so easily organised by ruthless governments / corporations”. Instead it says “people suck, but fuck wouldn’t it be great to be so fucking rich?”
Indictment of greed and the dog-eat-dog world created by rampant consumerism and the gig economy this is not. Shallow celebration of getting it done and getting that bag, it might just be. I was a fool to expect more.
I still found it entertaining (enough, some of the time). I don’t know what a Machine Gun Kelly is or why we spend so much fucking time in the film with him, but that’s certainly another part of the film that I would have edited out if I could have.
If you know what these Paul Feig comedies are like, then you know what this flick is like. You know, those flicks where actors improv certain lines in ways that make it shockingly obvious that the script had a gap in it saying “insert placeholder for funny line here”. And then you just know they had the actors stand on their marks and have someone repeat a line like “you look like a cross between a bulldog and a buttplug” and “and you look like if a photocopier fucked a cabbage” and then another fifteen lines and they would decide in the editing suite which one was the spiciest.
My favourite line in the whole flick was when Katie accuses her landlord / roommate / AirBnB host Shadi (Ayden Mayeri) of being bad at improv, and she says “No I’m not, I just need time to prepare.”
It’s not even meta, it’s not even fourth-wall breaking. Neither are the references to Youtube famous people and wrestlers being movie stars these days cutting nor catty – it’s lazy bullshit.
And yet I still sat through the whole fucking thing. It’s not great and I despair for our species, but I do love me some Awkwafina and Cena, the latest and greatest comedy duo foisted upon us by Amazon Studios.
6 times like a lot of things we can probably lay the blame at Jeff Bezo’s feet out of 10
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