It’s seldom that the prolific Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People, Tristram Shandy) hits rock bottom, but when he does, expect to exit picking asphalt from your eyes. As much as one applauds the director’s desire to work in all types of film, he easily could have skipped the “toothless satire” genre. In his youth, Sir Richard (Steve Coogan) would pawn himself off as a magician simply to pocket the stranger’s coin he borrowed to do a trick. Small wonder, then, that adulthood finds our former shmate picker-turned-billionaire fashion designer cast in the role of the “unacceptable face of capitalism.” The sixth big screen collaboration between Coogan and Winterbottom finds a wobbly-constructed pulpit from which to spend the first half-hour preaching manifest messages loud and clear. The rest of the running time is consumed in playing slave to repetition. The audience-awakening shower of bricks rings down the curtain with the earth-shattering notion that homeless are people, too. With Isla Fisher, basically repeating her role in The Beach Bum. 2019. (2019) — Scott Marks
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