davidehrlich’s review published on Letterboxd:
If family is the sharpest and most cutting of double-edged swords, few storytellers have ever wielded it with more violent enthusiasm than Wes Anderson, whose movies often start with — and then scab over — the seemingly mortal kind of wound that only a severed relationship can leave behind, and only a carefully mended one can ever hope to fix. In that sense and several others, “The Phoenician Scheme” is the most enthusiastically violent film that Anderson has made thus far.
Spackled together from all the gray paint and seriocomic grotesquerie that he couldn’t find a use for in his previous work, the “Asteroid City” auteur’s hectic father-daughter story takes pains to clarify a certain ethos at the root of his art, even if it does frustratingly little to flesh that ethos out any further.
We’ll go to that, but first — the violence. Like so many of Anderson’s bad dads before him, mid-century European business mogul Anatole “Zsa-zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro) is determined to be larger than life or die trying. No one has managed to kill him quite yet, but they’re getting awfully close — as we see in a high-flying prologue that makes it weirdly easy to imagine how Anderson might have shot the first scene of “The Dark Knight Rises.”
“The Phoenician Scheme” begins with one character being shredded in half by a saboteur’s bomb, and ends with another character getting their head blown off by a hand grenade. In between those two explosions are several plane crashes, a spate of trigger-happy communist revolutionaries, and a homicidal argument over the profits from a poison gas that has killed more than 10,000 soldiers.
And yet, Zsa-zsa repeatedly insists that he feels “very safe.” For a man who mostly communicates in maxims, that might be the closest thing he has to a mantra. And why shouldn’t he feel safe? The immoveable center of a sweet but frantically spinning caper in which family is presented as the only force more inescapable than death (family is a lot of things, okay?), Zsa-zsa has effortlessly managed to elude them both for as long as he can . Or so he thinks. The truth of the situation, as our unscrupulous hero starts to realize after surviving his sixth plane crash, is that every step he’s taken away from one has led him closer to the other, and vice-versa.