‘The Phoenician Scheme’ Review: Wes Anderson Refuses To Step Out of His Box

Warning: This review contains minor spoilers for The Phoenician Scheme.

Reviewing a new Wes Anderson movie is folly at this point. The renowned but divisive filmmaker isn’t about to stop what he’s doing, which is delivering twee, painterly black comedies that tend to be both striking and overly pretentious. You likely figured out a long time ago whether his distinct style, which he refuses to budge even an inch from, works for you or not. If you’re reading this, I assume you’ve counted yourself as #TeamWes through this point. In which case, the only question to address is whether there’s a line where, once crossed, his work just becomes fatally tiring in its unyielding similitude.

I’m sad to say that, with The Phoenician Scheme, I believe I’ve hit that line. All the Wes Anderson hallmarks are here: Immaculately framed images in a squarish aspect ratio that won’t fill out the full width of your theater screen; characters played by movie stars who oftentimes feel more like props than actual human beings; dry jokes meant to cleverly amuse more than draw belly laughs. In the past, these things have felt unique and exciting in serving Anderson’s particular version. Here, they make the film feel like a copy of a copy — another View-Master-shaped vision that doesn’t build on or expand from anything that came before.

What Is ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ About?

The plot of The Phoenician Scheme is impenetrable. It opens with the movie’s central character, Benicio del Toro’s Zsa-zsa Korda, surviving his umpteenth plane crash/assassination attempt. (A fellow passenger being turned into little more than bloody paste after an explosion blows a hole in the side of the plane is perhaps the movie’s only big laugh.) Korda is essentially a James Bond villain as filtered through Anderson. He’s a 20^th-century business tycoon who makes a living (and a long list of enemies) staging famines and taking financial advantage of various conflicts around the world.

He’s rattled after the latest attempt on his life, though, and decides to reconnect with his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) to make her his primary heir and eventual successor to his empire. Formally, Liesl is actually Sister Liesl, however, and she’s skeptical about giving up her nunhood in favor of more nefarious dealings. Still, she’s intrigued, and the pair head out to negotiate with a string of investors needed to pull off the titular Phoenician scheme, some kind of infrastructure stratagem involving what I think is the construction of a massive power plant. (Don’t blame me if that’s not quite right. Again, all of this is presented in the most dryly obtuse way imaginable.)

Wes Anderson Gathers Another All-Star Cast

As usual, Anderson has assembled a stellar cast to play out this work of cryptic levity. Faring best is Michael Cera as Bjørn, a man hired as a tutor/assistant who joins Korda and Liesl on their adventures but has his own hidden agenda. (Cera essentially plays two different characters in the film, and, combined, both prove to be the movie’s most consistent source of entertainment.) We’ve also got Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston as shady moguls who end up squaring off against Korda and Riz Ahmed’s upstart prince in a game of HORSE that’s the most surprising big-screen basketball sequence since either Alien: Resurrection or Escape from L.A. (Of those three, The Phoenician Scheme’s hoops-shooting bit firmly ranks last.)

Jeffrey Wright and Mathieu Amalric are on hand in colorful roles that don’t advance the plot terribly much. Scarlett Johansson logs maybe two minutes of screen time as a cousin Korda would like to marry just for business purposes. And Benedict Cumberbatch, sporting a bushy beard and wiry eyebrows, is Korda’s brother, Uncle Nubar, who’s crucial to the scheme but may have also murdered Liesl’s mother. The story tracks Korda, Liesl, and Bjørn as they quickly advance from one group of characters to the next, ultimately arriving at Cumberbatch’s final boss. Oh, also, there are odd interstitials where a group of celestial beings that includes Willem Dafoe and Bill Murray as God seemingly pass judgment on Korda’s life. Don’t ask me to explain it.

‘The Phoenician Scheme’ Feels Like Repetition, Not Reinvention

The movie tries to make the most out of a couple of running gags — Korda repeatedly assuring everyone that he feels safe despite the non-stop assassination attempts, the grenades Korda continually gives out as welcoming gifts — but none of it gels into a narrative worth investing in that rises above Anderson’s typically cutesy plotting. Which, look, is a thing that can happen. I still adore The Grand Budapest Hotel, which remains Anderson’s most accessible and widely loved movie for a reason. And I was moderately on board with Asteroid City just two years ago. I’m not sure how much sense that one made in the end, but there were a lot of fun things happening around the fringes.

But, with The Phoenician Scheme, it feels like somebody’s hit a wall. I’m just not sure if it’s Anderson himself with his continued devotion to an artistic vision that’s really starting to feel stagnant, or if it’s instead me, someone who’s never been a full-blown Anderson acolyte and might have to accept the fact that the emotional connection I made to Budapest’s cast of characters was a one-off. The rest of his work, including early films he made his name on, like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, I find to be, for the large part, fine. But “fine” gets old after a while, and I didn’t have much fun watching The Phoenician Scheme.

I Want a Little More From Wes Anderson At This Point

What you might be most interested in is how Threapleton fares, being that she’s Kate Winslet’s daughter and this is her highest profile role to date (eclipsing her starring role in a little-seen 2020 Italian thriller called Shadows). And the thing is, I wouldn’t have any idea how to answer that question. She delivers Anderson’s dialogue like pretty much everyone else — in a largely monotonic, clipped fashion. And when she’s not talking, she’s fidgeting with a prop (typically a smoking pipe or a knife) and standing firm in the precise corner of the frame that Anderson wants her. Though she has the most well-defined character arc in the movie, she never really feels compellingly human enough to be worth rooting for, even while she’s trying to convince Korda that they don’t need to resort to slave labor and forced famines to enact their big plans.

What we’re left with is a movie that is distinctly Anderson’s but also shallow and unaffecting. There’s just not much to The Phoenician Scheme past its now-mundane artistic precision and a succession of well-known actors playing quirky characters who feel like they came straight out of a Wes Anderson factory. For a while, that might have been good enough (and still might be for some of you). But I’m really starting to wish Anderson was cooking up a scheme of his own to go a little more off-template.

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