Jesse Armstrong must have missed making Succession. His new movie, Mountainhead, is another quippy skewering of the billionaire class. Its basic setup is four tech CEOs who meet for a poker weekend while dramatic events are occurring worldwide involving their businesses—a tried and true formula for Succession episodes. Nicholas Britell provides a score with little to no difference from the ones he used to churn out weekly for Armstrong. Most of what’s here feels very familiar, to its detriment.
Our four leads are Venis Parish (Cory Michael Smith), the CEO of a social media company called Traam, Randall Garrett (Steve Carell), a telecommunications mogul, Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef), founder of an AI company, and Hugo “Souper” Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman), whose mindfulness app hasn’t made him nearly as wealthy as his peers. Randall has just received a terminal cancer diagnosis, unbeknownst to the rest of the group.
Meanwhile, Venis has just launched a generative AI feature to Traam worldwide, and it is working a little too well, as users have been unable to distinguish AI-generated content from reality. His team advises him to form a partnership with Jeff, whose company could provide real-time fact-checking for generated content. Jeff isn’t too keen to partner with Venis after some hurtful public comments, and sees his company’s value skyrocket with the rocky rollout of Traam’s new features.
All this information is established, and we are dropped into Van Yalk’s new mountain home for our four characters to make quips and backstab each other while making increasingly diabolical schemes. Armstrong still displays an acute ability to portray very rich people in a way that is both terrifying and darkly funny, and perhaps closer to reality than any of us would care to admit.
The main issue here is that Armstrong doesn’t quite figure out how to make a movie out of it. He definitely takes advantage of the standalone nature here, as he escalates the black comedy aspects in ways that wouldn’t be possible if he were worried about how to keep things going for another nine episodes. Other than that, though, Mountainhead doesn’t do enough to set itself apart from Succession.
It isn’t so much a quality issue as Armstrong has produced some of the best television out there. But the formats have tradeoffs – television allows for more time with characters and extended storylines, while movies are more discrete with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Mountainhead gets the worst of both worlds, as it has the runtime of a movie but doesn’t take real advantage of the possibilities of the new medium.
The four leads give strong performances and clearly seem to be having fun working with Armstrong’s dialogue and sensibilities. In particular, Ramy Youssef is clearly relishing the opportunity to play a character who isn’t very sympathetic, and shows pretty good range versus the persona he’s established in his own show.
Mountainhead was dropped unceremoniously straight to HBO Max this week. I mentioned to my wife that I was going to watch it, and she was surprised to learn it was a movie and not a series. That is apt, because it feels very much like a supersized episode of television.
