★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
“Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong knows how vigorously we devoured his royal skewing of media dynasties. He has the ratings and the Emmys to prove it. But instead of branching off into, what, westerns or musicals, Armstrong has gone back to the well of toxic billionaires and tech bros ready do their soul-sucking worst. Can’t blame him since he sticks the knife in so effing well and this time as a director and writer.
So, yes, the British Armstrong takes on America again in “Mountainhead,” which starts airing its satirical whupass simultaneously on HBO and Max on May 31. People keep asking if “Mountainhead” is as good as “Succession." Are you kidding me? You can’t compare a single two-hour movie—sharp as it is—against four seasons of a now classic series that ran the gauntlet for 39 episodes. At least I can’t. If Armstrong is covering familiar territory, as some analysts claim, nobody does it better.
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With Armstrong calling the shots for the first-rate likes of Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith and Ramy Youssef, you really can’t go that wrong. The single setting is a beyond affordable Utah mountain retreat where four envious one-percenters go to shoot each other dead, metaphorically at least and just for a weekend, when it’s decided in advance that talking business is grounds for exclusion.
Good luck with that. Smith’s Venis is a social media master who shamelessly wears the crown as the filthiest of the filthy rich. His Traam platform allows users to deepfake their way into their wild, dangerous fantasies - forget who gets hurt by the deranged digital images they produce. Hey, no one invited empathy to this party. But what if Traam’s victims start suing? Ven’s not so secret agenda is to lean on Youseff’s Jeff, who’s devised an artificial intelligence thingie to block the more inflammatory fakes.
Got that? Hang on. The weekend’s host, Schwartzman’s Hugo Van Yalk, can’t do much to help. He’s dismissively known as Souper, meaning soup kitchen, because his wealth can only measured in the millions. What a piker. Carell’s Randall, the fourth guest and the second wealthiest, is actually the “poppa bear” who mentored these other assholes but is more concerned with a cancer diagnosis that even money can’t cure—a real tragedy in bro culture.
OK, we’ve seen these monsters taken down before in popular in fiction like “Succession,” but the reality of DOGE trumps “Mountainhead” for the damage done to whole societies in the name of government efficiency. The title, a not-so-veiled reference to “The Fountainhead,"author Ayn Rand’s unhinged salute to right-wing positivism, suggests that the new era of malignant moralism is just getting started.
It's a dynamite cast — with extra kudos to Carell and Schwartzman for going deeper and scarier into the way unchecked greed can eradicate the last vestiges of decency in characters who barely remember they once possessed it. “Mountainhead” ends with the threat still out there and flourishing. That means we need creators like Armstrong to call us on it. Armstrong knows it only hurts when we laugh, so he keeps us laughing constantly. Godspeed.