MOVIE REVIEW | The Phoenician Scheme – The Phoenician Scheme is Wes Anderson at his most Anderson. It’s visually immaculate, absurdly plotted, and stacked to the brim with celebrity cameos that feel more like distractions than decisions. And yet, for all the hyper-curated production design and meta-cleverness, it’s missing the one thing that makes a film worth watching: emotional weight.
Benicio del Toro plays Korda, a morally dubious industrialist dodging assassination attempts and financial collapse while dragging along a cast of quirky characters who barely register as people. There’s his estranged daughter (Mia Threapleton), a Norwegian bug guy (Michael Cera), and a revolving door of A-listers like Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, and Benedict Cumberbatch, whose villainous turn as Uncle Nubar borders on laughable. These aren’t characters you grow to care about—they’re paper dolls in symmetrical sets.
Sure, it’s clever. That’s the problem. The whole film feels engineered to be discussed, decoded, and dissected by the kind of people who think “real cinema” only happens at 3am, ideally while sipping a glass of organic red and eating grilled halloumi in front of SBS. If you’ve ever been accused of “just not getting it” when you find an arthouse film boring, you’ll understand the vibe here. The Phoenician Scheme practically dares you to dislike it—and then subtly shames you for doing so.
And while it’s tempting to say “at least it’s pretty,” that’s a weak defense for a film with no pulse. There are moments of inspired silliness—a blood-transfusion business deal, a basketball game to settle a dispute in a half-built underground railway—but they land with a shrug. Even the soundtrack and set pieces, usually a high point in Anderson’s work, feel like they’re going through the motions.
Unlike The Grand Budapest Hotel, which managed to wrap its style around something tender and human, The Phoenician Scheme feels emotionally vacant. No one has an arc, no one grows, and nothing really matters. My friend Zak walked out with 20 minutes to go, and honestly, I was jealous.
This one’s for the cinephile purists—the skinny soy latte types who think “boring” is just a synonym for “intellectual.” They’ll call it a masterpiece. The rest of us can call it what it is: a boring, self-satisfied parade of empty quirk.
Rating
Aaron: 2 / 10 “All style, no soul – The Phoenician Scheme is a hollow, quirky mess masquerading as cinema.”
Zak: 1 / 10 “my first ever walk out. I didn’t like a single character“
Cinema Experience:
Watching The Phoenician Scheme at Windsor Cinema felt like being part of an arthouse prank—one where the joke is on the audience and the punchline is a cramped seat, a tiny screen, and technical chaos.
Let’s start with the cinema. Windsor has all the surface charm: the bold navy tower, the red stripes, and the art deco curves you’ve probably admired driving down Stirling Highway. It’s a cinema that wants to feel cultured, nostalgic, and a little bit elite. And it is large—deceptively so from the outside—but unfortunately, that size doesn’t translate to comfort or quality.
The seating setup is bizarrely cramped. The rows are so tightly packed it felt more like boarding a discount international flight than settling in for a night of “real cinema.” There was barely room to cross my legs, let alone sit comfortably for a full-length feature. Then there’s the screen—shockingly small for such a big room. Worse still, The Phoenician Scheme was only projected on about 60% of it, like the film itself couldn’t be bothered to show up in full.
But the real disaster began when the movie started playing—with the cinema’s lobby music still blaring over the film’s opening scenes. After 10 surreal minutes of mismatched sound, we were told the screening would restart. One fellow reviewer shouted, “Please don’t!” and honestly, it was the most authentic emotional moment of the evening.
When the film started again, the lights stayed on. Then off. Then on again. Then back off. The technical glitches became their own tragic comedy—more entertaining than the film, which played like a smug collage of empty quirk and half-baked metaphors.
This wasn’t a celebration of cinema—it was a reminder that looking like you care about film isn’t the same as delivering a meaningful experience.
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MOVIE REVIEW | The Phoenician Scheme
About the Movie
Story By: Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola
Screenplay By: Wes Anderson
Directed By: Wes Anderson
Producers: Wes Anderson, Steven Rales, Jeremy Dawson, John Peet
Oscar-winning auteur, Wes Anderson, is back with the stylish, star-studded espionage black comedy, THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME; penned by Anderson and dreamed up alongside frequent co-writer and collaborator Roman Coppola (Moonrise Kingdom, Isle of Dogs, The Darjeeling Limited).
Promising Anderson’s signature visual style and distinctive storytelling, the oddball journey is an absurdist and action-packed tale of espionage following a complex father-daughter relationship within a family business. Oscar winner Benicio del Toro (Traffic) stars as a derring-do millionaire called Zsa-zsa Korda, who has survived six plane crashes and fathered nine sons and one daughter, a nun called Liesel (Mia Threapleton).
With tutor Bjorn Lund (Michael Cera), they embark on a quest to secure the future of Korda’s business ventures, and soon become the target of scheming tycoons, foreign terrorists and determined assassins.
Premiering at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Anderson’s thirteenth film boasts a stacked A-list ensemble cast of longtime Anderson favourites and several newcomers, including, Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Rupert Friend, Richard Ayoade, Bryan Cranston, Riz Ahmed, Mathieu Amalric, Jeffrey Wright, Hope Davis, and a generously hairy Benedict Cumberbatch.
Thanks ChatGPT. Maybe you should learn how to hide your AI use before you attempt to pass yourself off as a writer, especially when criticising someone else’s creative efforts.
Thanks Anon from anon.com All of my comments and thoughts are my own. I have no issue saying I use Chat GPT to clean up my work. I wrote a 3 paragraph review and then asked GPT to polish it for a professional review. That is absolutely okay if you don’t like me doing that. Not a great movie at all in my opinion