The Media Tourist

Director Wes Anderson’s latest eccentric curveball of a movie has an all-star cast in a globetrotting tale of shady international business shenanigans

The Phoenician Scheme
Starring Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton & Michael Cera
Directed by Wes Anderson
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, May 30

Like other films by director Wes Anderson, The Phoenician Scheme is an eccentric curveball of quirky characters, dark humor, deadpan delivery and meticulous visual flair. If you loved Moonrise Kingdom, The French Dispatch, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel, you’ll feel cozily at home with this wildly unpredictable, globetrotting tale of an amoral, assassination-dodging 1950s tycoon (Benico Del Toro) trying to put together a massive power-grab project in the Mediterranean.

In between recurring avant-garde afterlife dream sequences, there’s international sabotage and market manipulation, oddball investors, retro-cool gizmos, an insect-loving Norwegian etymologist (Michael Cera) with a secret, and a pipe-smoking young woman (Mia Threapleton) who may, or may not, be cut out for the convent life. Tom Hanks and Brian Cranston play a pair of characters who do business over a game of basketball…in a train tunnel. There’s Scarlett Johannson, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Riz Almed, F. Murray Abraham, Jeffrey Wright, Charlottes Gainsbourgh—and Benedict Cumberbatch as an estranged uncle with a grudge, and a golly-whopper thicket of facial hair.

A recurring line is “Help yourself to a hand grenade.” And most people do.

There’s a group of militant guerrilla fighters, discussions about faith and atheism, two plane crashes, quicksand, flying arrows from a crossbow, and an endearingly soft emotional subtext about the importance of family.  And oh, yeah, Bill Murray is God.

It’s all played super seriously for laughs, with everyone all-aboard the big, caustically funny running joke. Some of the faces will be familiar from previous Wes Anderson movies, but Threapleton (the daughter of Oscar-winning Kate Winslet) and Cera both shine in their debuts with the director, becoming central to the movie’s ever-evolving plotline. Here’s hoping to see them both again in another wild-ride Anderson caper.

“This is just…crazy,” Threapleton’s character says at one point. You may agree. The Phoenician Scheme is, indeed, crazy—but it’s precisely the kind of delightful absurdity that fans of Wes Anderson movies have come to expect and adore.

—Neil Pond