At the Angelika Film Center this week on Tuesday, I went to see The Phoenician Scheme, a 2025 espionage black comedy written and directed by Wes Anderson, starring an ensemble cast featuring Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jeffrey Wright, Stephen Park, Mathieu Almaric, Scarlett Johansson, Richard Ayoade, Rupert Friend, Hope Davis, Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Bill Murray.
The film takes place in 1950, where the arms dealer and industrialist Anatole "Zsa Zsa" Korda (del Toro) keeps narrowly avoiding death after a series of assassination attempts and controversies, as well as being criticized for his unethical business practices, shown through surviving a plane crash and in a newspaper montage. After he is briefly in the afterlife, while unconscious, where he faces a divine court before coming back to life, he knows that he will die for real someday soon, so he tracks down his estranged daughter, a Catholic novice, Sister Liesl (Mia Threapleton), and wants her to be the sole heir to his estate. Liesl is wary of her father, since he sent her away to live in a convent when she was 5, and she believes that he killed her mother, which he denies.
The title refers to his plans to stake his fortune on overhauling the infrastructure of Phoenicia with slave labor, and an government agent, Excalibur (Rupert Friend) wants to drive up the price of building materials, which would bankrupt Korda.
The film takes a lot of turns of Korda going to various associates and conspiring in his scheme to get money and build contacts, while denying that he killed Liesl's mother and finding out the truth about what happened to her. He also has a personal assistant, Bjorn (Michael Cera), a Norwegian entomologist.
I had trouble completely following this film, and I was in it more for liking the cast and Wes Anderson's trademark storybook look to his films than being invested in the plot. I had to read more in the Wikipedia plot summary to understand a lot that just went over my head, either if the characters spoke too quickly or I wasn't paying close attention. I did like some fun parts of it, like a scene with Michael Cera that is an equivalent to the "hot girl takes off her glasses" trope but with a nerdy guy, letting Michael Cera play against type for a little bit, and a goofy fight scene between Benicio del Toro and Benedict Cumberbatch where I liked the physical comedy in it. The opening title sequence, which plays as an overhead shot as del Toro is in a tub as attendants take care of him and the cast credits run on the screen, was nice to watch the whole scene play out for the length of the opening credits.
This isn't as memorable as other Wes Anderson films, as I much preferred The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel, but it's far from his worst, which was The Darjeeling Limited for me (aside from the moving sequence with Irrfan Kahn). I would think this would be a two and a half star film at best.
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