Movie Review: Triangle of Sadness

 

Michael's Movie Grade: F

A pretentious waste of time. 

This movie claims to be a satire of the rich and wealthy. However there is nothing either clever or funny about it. Despite this film desperately wanting to say something, when you look beneath the surface it doesn't say much of anything. It relies on very simplistic stereotypes of groups of people and pretentious conversations about socialism, capitalism or gender equality that sound smarter than they really are. During the third act this movie basically steals from J.M. Barrie's stage play, The Admirable Crichton (which was used as the basis for multiple films in the past including The Admirable Crichton (1918), Male and Female (1919), Charlemagne (1933), We're Not Dressing (1934), Back to Nature (1936) and The Admirable Crichton (1957)). Only this version lacks all of the charm of that story especially since Crichton's role went to a character who we barely spent any time with before the third act ruining the effect of the role reversal. What this movie deep down says about the extremely wealthy is no deeper than what a Three Stooges or Marx Brothers film might have to say. Only those movies are actually funny. The humor mostly revolves around horrible people being horrible people. This is simply not funny only unpleasant and for a movie nearly 2 and a half hours, the only decent joke was already in the trailer. With neither depth nor good humor, we are simply stuck with characters that we don't like for the whole film with no reason to care what happens with them. This is one of those satires where it is obvious that the filmmakers are disgusted by the type of people they are satirizing. This is a very risky thing to do as when these types of films don't work, they come off as nothing but mean spirited and unpleasant and that is all this movie is.  

I love art house movies. Many of them are truly beautiful films that deserve to be as well-known as more mainstream movies. However, this is the kind of film that will forever tarnish their reputation and keep average movie goers for checking out some truly great art films.