“Anderson’s films have become predictable not for their convoluted plots themselves, but for their failure to draw any emotion from them.”

Colorful production design, meticulously composed shots, stilted line deliveries, convoluted plots. By now, ChatGPT could probably create a Wes Anderson movie. A man who has always been a great storyteller, but not a great story writer, so there’s no reason not to believe an AI would create something similarly complicated but without a soul. His latest, The Phoenician Scheme, about a wealthy and ruthless, and also very much despised, business tycoon and his nun daughter trying to get a major infrastructure project funded for incomprehensible reasons, features the regular string of peculiar supporting characters performed by the regular string of Anderson actors, give or take a new one (it’s hard to tell, since performances in his films rarely linger). By now, appreciation of any new film by the American writer-director depends more or less on the enjoyment of the concocted locales (Anderson never shies away from a bit of orientalism, so your moral mileage may vary) and the imagination of the collaborators behind the camera. His latest in particular makes you wonder whether Anderson should attempt a live action film centered on Belgium’s most famous character, Tintin, because his sensibilities feel much the same as Hergé’s brainchild. It could probably give Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s 2011 soulless The Adventures of Tintin a run for its money.

The Phoenician Scheme puts the spotlight on Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro, not one of the worst of Anderson’s leading actors), known to enemies and friends alike as Mr. Five Percent, an über-wealthy tycoon who has made his fortune through shady deals and shafting his business partners. When we meet him he has just thwarted the latest attempt at his life; the one putting the hit out on his name could be anyone given the number of enemies he has made over the years. After barely surviving he summons his only daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton, whose vocal inflections sound eerily close to her mother’s, Kate Winslet), to make her his provisional sole heir, should one of these attempts at his life succeed. His nine sons get nothing, everything goes to the pious Liesl, the nun. Right after the girl signs the contract, a gaggle of bureaucrats decides to financially cripple Korda by manipulating the markets, which forces him to set his master plan in motion: the Phoenician Scheme, an incredibly complicated waterworks project for which he needs to bridge a financial gap (because of the aforementioned financial manipulations). He resolves to enlist a group of investors to cover this gap, and thus we get a series of miniature adventures in which the likes of Tom Hanks, Mathieu Amalric, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Jeffrey Wright, and Riz Ahmed are all begged to chip in based on earlier agreements that Korda has fiddled with. Oh, and Richard Ayoade as a well-spoken Che Guevara look-alike features in some of these for unclear reasons. All goes bust when Korda’s half-brother Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch) shows up, revealing himself to be the mastermind behind the many assassination attempts, but by this point the plot has worked itself into so many knots that it’s hard to unravel.

The increasingly chaotic proceedings are interspersed with black-and-white scenes in which Korda is in heaven, which suggests that maybe he didn’t survive the plane crash that opens the film. More likely though Anderson scribbled these scenes just to get more of his pals (F. Murray Abraham, Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Bill Murray as God, because why not?) to expand an already bloated cast that also sees Michael Cera take a rather sizeable role as a tutor-slash-spy and Stephen Park as a pilot that gets ejected from his plane not once, but twice. Oddly enough, had the heavenly scenes been silent they would have been some of the most visually arresting things Anderson has ever done, monochrome color scheme be damned. The man’s imagination definitely knows no bounds, but he increasingly stumbles when he has to write something resembling heart and soul into his concoctions. The Phoenician Scheme again sees him going through the motions, eliciting a slight chuckle here or there and a stunning visual on occasion, but failing to create anything memorable. By now, his films have become predictable not for their convoluted plots themselves, but for their failure to draw any emotion from them.