GREEDY PEOPLE - Mark Reviews Movies

Greedy People, Lionsgate

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 22, 2024

A million dollars is a lot of money to a couple of small-town cops, an expecting mother, a masseur and his too-curious mother, a professional killer, and even a local seafood tycoon. Those are some of the characters who know about and, obviously, want the cash for themselves in Greedy People, a darkly comedic thriller that might not know when to quit adding more and more pieces to its puzzle and pawns in its game.

The screenplay by Mike Vukadinovich starts with a fairly narrow and rather enticing point of view. We meet the two cops: rookie Will (Himesh Patel), who has moved to this quaint place to start a family with his wife, and Terry (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), whose experience as an officer of the law seems to amount to knowing the best places in town to get free cups of coffee throughout the day.

It's that kind of place, where not much—especially in terms of crime—happens, and Terry is that kind of cop, who sees the gig as a series of perks as trivial as free coffee and as significant to his ego as being able to hold power over just about everyone. These two characters are intriguing, because they seem real enough and offer the kind of dynamic that might give them room to reveal themselves.

Then, the money comes into play, and little else in this world will tell you the quality of a person—or the lack thereof—than the chance to steal a million bucks with no one being too much the wiser. That a dead body is involved here makes the thievery more difficult to navigate, of course, but as soon as Will and Terry decide to take the cash under the circumstances in which they grab it, we instantly know one last thing about the two men. It's not pleasant.

Somehow, though, this setup isn't enough for Vukadinovich, whose script becomes busy introducing new players into the mix, a string of motives and complications for each of those characters, and a structure that takes the time to inform us what these characters want and why they want it. The answer for all of them, of course, is the money, and the reason, well, is because it's there.

What does this actually tell us about any of them, though? The title isn't just a description of the characters. It's a mission statement for the whole of the movie, which repeats the same point over and over. It's not really about these characters, then, so much as it's about the convoluted web of each story overlapping in ways of which most of the characters are ignorant.

How much of this is too much? That's up for debate, obviously, but considering how strong the stuff with the cops is in the first act or so of this story, the additions and complexities become too much somewhere in between that and the multi-character tapestry of greed, betrayals, and murder where it winds up.

Some of those other players include Will's pregnant wife Paige (Lily James), the freelance massage therapist/unofficial gigolo Keith (Simon Rex), and the seafood magnate Wallace (Tim Blake Nelson). It's Wallace's wife (played by Traci Lords) who ends up dead by Will's hands.

It's an accident, of course, as Will receives a call from the police station's dispatch informing him a crime in progress. He gets the code wrong, believing an armed robbery is happening, and after the wife takes offense to Will discharging his firearm, the two fight, leading her to a fatal crash through a table.

Terry, who was busy having an affair with a married woman when the call came through, arrives, realizes they'll both be punished for the woman's death if they report it, and convinces Will that they need to make it look like a robbery gone wrong. That's when they find the money and decide to hide it until things settle.

Since we know the kind of people these two men are and what they value most (For Will, it's his family, and for Terry, it's control), the initial setup is fairly engaging. Despite his partner's warning not to say a word to anyone, Will tells Paige, lying about who unintentionally killed the woman in the process, and because her husband and her unborn child and her own fates are at stake, the wife wants to know what kind of partner-in-crime Terry is. There's a scene here in which Terry reveals that as a, in his mind, trivial anecdote, and Gordon-Levitt is quite chilling here as a man so pathetic that his vulnerable ego makes him a potentially considerable threat.

There's plenty of tension just in the relationships among these three, in other words, which makes the onslaught of other parties—from the aforementioned characters to a pair of hitmen (played by Jose Yazpik and Jim Gaffigan)—even more confounding. Everything and everyone in Greedy People become reduced to one-note strings of conniving and corruption, apart from the cops' captain (played by Uzo Aduba), the one character who stands outside the mire without realizing how deep and murky it actually is. Her inclusion is refreshing amidst the immorality and amorality on display, but ultimately, even that's just part of the elaborate but shallow game being played.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products