Succession is one of the past decade’s very best TV shows: a razor-sharp and insightful portrait of an obscenely wealthy family as they insult each other to their faces before stabbing each other in the back. So when Succession creator Jesse Armstrong revealed he’s writing and directing a new original movie for HBO, I was excited. Well, that movie is here — Mountainhead (now streaming on Max) — but sadly, it just stands as a massive miscalculation. As a follow-up to Succession, it fails, in spectacular fashion.
Mountainhead takes the key elements we remember from Succession —the ridiculous displays of wealth; the cruel digs; the callous attitude towards anyone outside the 1 percent —and cranks up the intensity on them to unbearable levels. It also forgets to include any of the innate humanity and complexity that made Succession’s characters so fascinating to watch. A lot of people didn’t like Succession because they thought the characters were too unlikable to root for. Mountainhead feels like that, times a thousand.
It’s essentially a play set in one location, although it’s a very nice location: a luxe ski lodge owned by one of four very rich tech titans who are old friends and gather for a regular poker weekend. The owner is Souper (Jason Schwartzman), the butt of every joke in the friend group because his measly net worth has yet to cross a billion (or “a B-nut”). He’s joined by elder statesman Randall (Steve Carell), idealistic AI expert Jeff (Ramy Youssef) and the richest of them all: Ven (Cory Michael Smith), a clear Elon Musk analogue who rules over his social media empire with a cocky bravado.
They razz each other, they drink expensive liquor, they crow about their net worths. (On a ski excursion, they paint each other’s current value on their chests and howl like wolves.) Some of this is amusing, in a Succession sort of way, but the dialogue is swamped in an impenetrable tech-bro lingo that makes it hard to understand what they’re even talking about. (I even put on the subtitles, and still didn’t catch half the references.) Then the wheels fall off when they see news reports of violence and chaos exploding around the world thanks to Ven’s platform and its new ability to create AI deepfakes of news that looks real to the untrained eye. Seen through the lens of our volatile political climate these days, this all hits a little too close to home, and the guys’ blasé attitude to seeing widespread death and suffering from their ivory tower just gives off a foul stench.
That’s bad enough, but if you thought Mountainhead was teetering on the cliff already, it goes toppling right over the edge when —and this constitutes a spoiler if you haven’t watched yet, but really, don’t bother —Jeff refuses to sell his AI innovations to Ven to fix the platform, and the other three come up with a solution: Let’s kill Jeff! It’s supposed to be darkly comic and absurd, I guess, to watch these three calmly plan a murder like it’s just another corporate acquisition, but it turned my stomach. Even worse, as they approach Jeff’s room to do the deed, they start chanting “Khashoggi” —a reference to the Saudi journalist who was murdered in cold blood —which is just unforgivably repellent.
All four stars are more than capable actors, but they’re left adrift here by Armstrong’s script. Carell, in particular, takes a badly misguided approach to Randall, adopting a fancy semi-British accent for some reason and then screaming like Anchorman’s Brick Tamland at inappropriate times. Smith comes the closest to crafting a three-dimensional character as Ven, but really, it’s no use. These men are so devoid of any semblance of ethical boundaries that even spending just two hours with them borders on insufferable.
In the end, thankfully, Jeff does survive by agreeing to sell his AI tech to Ven, and Mountainhead resets to some level of normalcy, with the guys just chalking this up as another crazy weekend. It’s a deeply unsatisfying end to a deeply unsatisfying film, and one that feels like a major disappointment coming from Armstrong. The whole thing feels rushed and half-baked, like it was more important to get this on the air before the Emmy deadline than it was to take the time to make an actually good film. Given how excellent Succession was, I’ll still be looking forward to whatever Armstrong does next —and I’ll do my best to forget everything I saw at Mountainhead.
That’s our take, but what’s yours? If you watched Mountainhead, give it a grade in our poll, and hit the comments to expand on your thoughts.