Popcorn Perspectives with Danny Minton
Week of June 2, 2025
The Phoenician Scheme
Rated PG-13 for smoking throughout, nude images, bloody images, some sexual material, and violent content
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 78%
In Theaters
In Wes Anderson’s latest creation, Benicio Del Toro plays an industrialist and arms dealer named Zsa-Zsa Korda who is trying to survive a series of assassination attempts and near-death experiences in order to makes his latest ambitious scheme come to life. But in order to bring it to fruition, he recruits his long-lost daughter (Mia Threapleton), who happens to be a nun, as well as the tutor he has hired for his multitudes of sons (Michael Cera) to follow him on a series of missions to persuade several parties to bend to his requests to make the project happen. Amongst all the directors working today, Anderson’s work is definitely the most distinctive. His style is quirky, whimsical, and usually frivolous, which happens to again be the case here. What we get with this story is another situation where the plot is insane, but easy enough to digest because of how it’s pulled off. Anderson does this by once again incorporating an impressive cast of actors, including Tom Hanks, Riz Ahmed, Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, and others, who all play over-the-top characters, to distract you from the fact that the story is not very compelling without them, but works because of them. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as the film is certainly entertaining and sometimes extremely funny. Since almost all of Wes’s projects are essentially only compared to his other works, this one falls in line easily, but just like most of his movies, it is mostly style and little substance. It’s been years since he has created a feature-length film comparable to the likes of The Royal Tenenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel or Rushmore, and it looks like we will have to wait a bit longer for something that stands out in that category. Fortunately, you can tell the creative spark is still there, and one of these days he is going to gives us another masterpiece. But for right now, The Phoenician Scheme can serve as a pleasant enough diversion and next chapter in a long list of quirky and colorful experiences. B