Film: The Phoenician Scheme
Cast: Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade
Writer/Director: Wes Anderson
Rating: 3/5
Runtime: 102 min.

Among writer/director Wes Anderson’s goofiest movies, ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ has a lot of physical humor and the sight gags, though as weird as they come, make for deeper content. It’s about an oligarch manipulating his family and others in business.  

The film opens with Benicio del Toro playing a businessman named Zsa-zsa Korda, surviving his sixth plane crash. Before the plane crashes a man is blown to smithereens and after the crash a deadpan, not too seriously injured Korda ruthlessly fires the pilot just as he lands after ejecting from the crashing plane. Someone has been trying to kill Korda for a while now, and he decides that before too long, he needs to protect his empire by naming an heir. He has nine sons, some of them adopted, but Korda has made his mind up to prepare his daughter, a nun named Liesl (Mia Threapleton), to take over.

The confrontation with mortality pushes the atheist billionaire to re-evaluate his priorities. That brush with death that propels him to deal honestly for the first time. But it's hard for someone who is so used to getting his own way by hook or by crook.