Wes Anderson knows exactly what he’s doing. Almost since the beginning of his now 30-plus-year career, the ever-quirky American auteur has established his instantly recognizable style—symmetrical shots, stilted scripts, immaculate production design, a generous dose of whimsy—and largely stuck to it. There have been notable highs that penetrated beyond the Andersonian sphere (2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums, 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel), but in more recent years, the director has seemed content to roll out a steady stream of amusing diversions which mainly cater to his existing fans. Asteroid City, the last film he premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, was a modest delight, and The French Dispatch and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, in my view, slightly less successful, but they didn’t play all that much with this established formula. However, his latest release, The Phoenician Scheme, which marks his return to the Croisette, is slightly different.
Yes, it’s shot with Anderson’s usual exactness, features incredibly surreal dialogue, intricately designed sets and costumes, and several head-scratching, almost hallucinatory sequences, but it also happens to be—wait for it—a blood-pumping action movie. There are giant explosions, brutal plane crashes in the jungle, shoot-outs in the desert, secret assassins, fist fights, flaming arrows, hand grenades, gruesome injuries and bullets which need extracting, and a more frenetic pace. The truth is, if you’re already tired of Anderson’s various idiosyncrasies, this likely won’t be enough to win you over—it is still very much a Wes Anderson film—but for those of us who are fond of the filmmaker but have been less enthused about his last few efforts, his latest injects an often thrilling new lease of life into proceedings.
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