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It has a slightly evocative Japanese touch crossed with its gritty 1980s aesthetic and film stock that is constantly pleasing to watch. Contrast the sensitivity of the relationships alongside the hard racing themes and you have art. It is almost a disservice that Patrick Stewart is there because he is all many viewers tend to focus on, usually as a means to roast the film. Why? He is sincere here. Yes, the acting is sometimes awkward in English but the authenticity of the film counters any bad that would come from this set-up. Stewart's narrative is touching. Hiroyuki Watanabe (RIP) is stoic and iconic on screen; his inexpressiveness is functional on screen. Of course, were he expressive, the racing would be superfluous. When films work with proper subtext, we don't realize how much we're psychically taking it, so the racing casts a psychological heft across the picture. This sort of protagonist fares in westerns, but to its credit it's stripped of this mythology letting the racing work impressionistically. While the characters feel real. The relationship to the daughter adds a third element here. Lastly, the Akira Inou score, and why many come to this movie; the tones, textures and color of the music serve to counter the film's gray and gritty realism. These separate elements allow the film to move like clockwork. Only the Japanese can make it seem so effortless, and it's why I suspect the awkward moments don't really hurt the film. When those land it always charms us in the same breath. There are hot takes online attempting to paint a narrative that this film is some horrible disgrace, it is sad when the desire to suckle up to the internet algorithm leads to bad faith viewings but that is hardly unique to this film, it is the entire zeitgeist in which we live where films need to function like oil extraction. I can say there is no oil here to extract except what's on the tracks. It is just a solid film worth seeking out.

This is another Hollywood remake of a foreign film, except unlike the original, it is incredibly politicized. Jesse Plemons is an amazon worker who hates billionaires and he talks about OSHA violations in the warehouse for literally 30 seconds, meaning you are already in a Hollywood anti-rich narrative (directed and starring millionaires). The original film played this scenario as a farce. This film is the arrogance of the Cannes film festival to the core. Yorgos Lanthimos is always a style in search of a subject. He has got it down to a formula, fashionable political "meaning", aka lecturing, with stark visuals and aloof ironic detachment. Add flashes of shocking ultra violence and now you are the art film of the year. Like so many films of that ilk, it is shlock, see also A24 and Neon, who make garbage but dress it up as something important. The mid-level audiences eat this whole aesthetic up because it makes them feel like their viewing is engaging in high culture. It was critically acclaimed after all. Blame Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange for ruining decades of directors with this whole aesthetic. There is an industry of them who bring them out every year, one after the other. Like the film Melancholia, they want us to clap along to the destruction of humanity, often because the headlines the year they made the film spooked them, so we all must be destroyed. Are we supposed to nod along and say because the media wrote scary headlines the apocalypse is deserved? Because there are rich people (like the actors and director who made this movie), things are beyond hope? I don't think they have personally thought this much about it, they are just cynically spamming a formula that brings them more fame and acclaim. But the answer is often, yes, these are lectures meant to shove Hollywood's politics down your throat. The Korean original is more of a Luc Besson or Jean-Pierre Jeunet style, like all Korean films it goes way bigger into extremes. By keeping the same ending as the Korean version, the film undermines whatever questions it built up in the preceding two hours that keeps you guessing. So a full structural rewrite could have made this into a more nuanced film. As it is, it is caught in both directions, keeping to the Korean ending, while desperately believing it is saying something profound about wealth disparity and humanity's evils. Even speaking of this movie in these terms is terrible though because it is not a serious movie like it thinks it is, but that just speaks to the incredible pretentiousness of this film and the arrogance of the Hollywood elite. There is a mainstream Hollywood is-he-an-alien movie called K-Pax that is somehow more profound and moving of an experience, it was made by Hollywood but before a time they looked at the audience with pure contempt, seeing them like mindless cattle that have to be spoon fed political ideology every single film. To their credit people actually sop it up and think they are high minded viewers better than everyone else for watching them. The end result is not an engagement in art but in clout, more akin to a fashion brand than an honest cinematic experience.

I expected a light comedy with some comical scenarios, but instead, this film is a hard political 'agenda' movie that lectures you on a political message from beginning to end, that the rich are evil and hold everyone down (an anti-corporation, anti-millionaire movie, made by a Hollywood corporation and its millionaires, this never ceases to amaze). Anything enjoyable about the movie begins to rings false once you see the mechanics of the script at work that it is only there to lecture you on its political message. Once you know that it is building toward a big anti-AI, anti-corporation lecture about how we would all be rich if only DoorDash paid its drivers more money, you feel completely cheated. It's so hollow, by the numbers, and lame. The comical part is that no one involved in this believed in their own message to give up all their money to their assistants and drivers.