Cannes: Viner on Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme – Superstars' Fun, Our Pain

The Cannes Film Festival closes this weekend and, unusually, two of the films that had the glitziest premieres there have already reached UK cinema screens.

Unfortunately, one’s a bit of a dud while the other is rather a drag.

The Phoenician Scheme

(15, 101 mins)

Verdict: Far too whimsical

Rating:

The Phoenician Scheme is the latest from acclaimed writer-director Wes Anderson, and has a typically top-notch cast. Benicio del Toro leads, with Tom Hanks, Benedict Cumberbatch, Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray and Bryan Cranston among the eye-catching names in supporting roles.

Anderson, it is said, is cinematic Marmite: folk either love his films or hate them. But maybe it’s also possible to fall out of love with Marmite.

The Phoenician Scheme is the latest from acclaimed writer-director Wes Anderson, and has a typically top-notch cast who all seem to be having a great time on screen

Anderson, it is said, is cinematic Marmite: folk either love his films or hate them. But maybe it’s also possible to fall out of love with Marmite

The Phoenician Scheme, alas, offers more of the same. In mitigation it’s consistently lovely on the eye. And it has a terrific, genuinely funny opening, but it careers downhill thereafter

I admired Rushmore (1998) and adored The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). But The French Dispatch (2021) and 2023’s Asteroid City seemed to me insufferably self-indulgent and often incoherent exercises in whimsy for whimsy’s sake. They amounted to journeys through Anderson’s undeniably fertile mind, and while there are always plenty delighted to go along for the ride, I just wanted to get off.

The Phoenician Scheme, alas, offers more of the same. In mitigation it’s consistently lovely on the eye. And it has a terrific, genuinely funny opening, but it careers downhill thereafter.

Set, like Asteroid City, in the 1950s, it boasts all Anderson’s usual flourishes – above all that mannered artificiality of dialogue, set and costume that has become his trademark.

The title refers to the latest dodge by a rich, conniving businessman called Zsa-Zsa Korda (del Toro), who keeps surviving assassination attempts. Korda has nine boys, but only one girl, Liesl. She’s a novitiate nun nicely played by (Kate Winslet’s daughter) Mia Threapleton, and even though they are estranged, she’s the one anointed as his successor, should his enemies ever succeed in killing him.

The cast plainly have a whale of a time as Korda whizzes round the world trying to bond with his daughter, finding backers for his dubious project, and confounding assassins.

I can imagine how much fun it is to be in a Wes Anderson film. But I for one no longer derive enough fun from watching them.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (12A, 169 mins)

Verdict: Impossibly long

Rating:

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning would be a lot more fun if it weren’t so long-winded, lasting almost three hours

A floppy-haired Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt of the Impossible Mission Force, criss-crossing the globe while attempting for the umpteenth time to save it

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning would be a lot more fun if it weren’t so long-winded, lasting almost three hours. A floppy-haired Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt of the Impossible Mission Force, criss-crossing the globe while attempting for the umpteenth time to save it, this time from a rogue slab of artificial intelligence known as The Entity.

There is one truly spectacular extended stunt, which sees Hunt clinging to the wings of a biplane in the clouds above South Africa, but far too much of Christopher McQuarrie’s picture gets bogged down in ponderous self-importance, when it should just be tongue-in-cheek escapism.

Maybe McQuarrie also felt that a colossal $400 million budget required a commensurately whopping running-time? Whatever, he could have cut half an hour by removing 90 per cent of the references to the world being on the edge of a precipice. As it is, by the end, you might find yourself wishing it would just fall off.

Fountain Of Youth (12A, 125 mins)

Verdict: Overflows with fun

Rating:

Guy Ritchie does a much better job with Fountain Of Youth, another action thriller with a potty plot, but which, crucially, never takes itself too seriously.

It benefits greatly from John Krasinski’s gently, engagingly facetious lead performance as Luke, an art thief, squabbling endlessly with his sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman), a museum curator.

Guy Ritchie does a much better job with Fountain Of Youth, another action thriller with a potty plot, but which, crucially, never takes itself too seriously.

It benefits greatly from John Krasinski’s gently, engagingly facetious lead performance as Luke, an art thief, squabbling with his sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman), a museum curator

Luke, it turns out, is pinching masterpieces by the likes of Rembrandt and Rubens because together they will lead him to the elusive elixir of life, required by his dying billionaire patron (Domhnall Gleeson)

The writer, by the way, is James Vanderbilt, of the famously wealthy family of industrialists, whose great-grandfather went down with the Lusitania in 1915. And he references that episode in the narrative, in a compellingly unlikely collision of fact and fiction.

Fountain Of Youth is on Apple TV+.

A longer review of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning ran last week.