“The Phoenician Scheme” Is a Hot Mess

The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson, 2025) 1 out of 5 stars

The films of auteurist director Wes Anderson are hit or miss for me. Aesthetically, he traffics in a distinctive style that sometimes serves the story and other times merely his whimsy. When both impulses unite, the result can be delightful and deeply meaningful, as with the 2023 Asteroid City (on my Top 10 list for that year). But when the tricks of his usual camerawork, compositions, editing techniques, and deadpan performances spiral into a maelstrom of gimmickry, the effect is tiresome. His latest, The Phoenician Scheme, falls into this latter category (even stealing the color palette of Asteroid City, thereby upping the self-derivative ante).

Benicio Del Toro (Sicario: Day of the Soldado) stars as Zsa-zsa Korda, a 1950s-era European businessman of excessive greed and zero morals. Though attempting to understand the plot proves headache-inducing, the gist of the narrative is that everyone wants to kill Korda, though they always fail to succeed. He has a grand stratagem to freeze out his current partners and take over control of the country of “Phoenicia” and shunt his funding gap (referred to throughout as “The Gap”) onto some of those partners. I think that’s the gist of it, though the structure is so baroque—and hardly the point of the exercise—that I could be fairly far off. The thing is, I don’t care.

Along the way, Korda decides to make his estranged (and only) daughter (among many sons), Liesl (Mia Threapleton, Firebrand), his sole heir. It’s not an act of love, but a purely mercenary act to protect his interests. She’s a novitiate nun, however, which poses a problem. Korda demands she leave the order; she demurs, at least for now.

Interspersed with the primary throughline are scenes in an imagined (or dreamed) afterlife, where Korda confronts his misspent existence. A Greek chorus and prophet call out his sins; God looks on, disappointed. Korda has limited time to change his ways.

On the one hand, The Phoenician Scheme can be seen as an ultimately sweet tale about a self-indulgent misanthrope learning to think beyond himself. On the other hand, that theme is so transparently obvious that it soon ceases to hold interest. Instead, we watch Anderson go through the customary motions, which do little more here than annoy.

Beyond Del Toro and Threapleton, the ensemble includes F. Murray Abraham (Mother, Couch), Riz Ahmed (Venom), Mathieu Amalric (The French Dispatch), Michael Cera (Barbie), Bryan Cranston (Argylle), Benedict Cumberbatch (The Mauritanian), Willem Dafoe (The Legend of Ochi), Tom Hanks (A Man Called Otto), Scarlett Johansson (Fly Me to the Moon), Jeffrey Wright (The Batman), and others, all of whom deliver lines according to the Andersonian method. They are not the problem here. Indeed, the cast is excellent. Rather, it’s the fact that we’ve seen it all before, with better framing. This scheme goes awry from the get-go and never recovers.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.