Sorry to Bother You.

Sorry to Bother You (now streaming on Hulu), Boots Riley’s debut as director and writer, is a total mess of a film. It’s not a mess in the sense of, say, The Room, which is legendary for its badness, but in the sense that Riley tried to do way too much in a single 110-minute picture, packing in enough thematic material for three movies, attempting to shock the audience at least one time too often, and, when the film starts to go off the rails in the final third, steering hard into the skid when he needed to correct his course. The result is a film with high-concept ambitions that can’t achieve any of them.

Lakeith Stanfield (Get Out) stars as Cassius “Cash” Green, an unemployed Oakland resident who lives in his uncle’s garage and lands a very low-end job with a telemarketing firm, RegalView, at the very beginning of the film. After a bunch of prologue that doesn’t entirely matter, he learns from an older colleague (Danny Glover) that he’ll sell more stuff if he uses his “white voice,” which Cash eventually finds almost by accident (voiced by David Cross). He becomes a star, is promoted to a “power caller,” and goes upstairs to the VIP level at the telemarketing firm, where he finds himself selling some ethically dubious products services. Meanwhile, his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson, whose earrings are the film’s best running gag) is a progressive artist and part-time agitator who works with a leftist-anarchist group The Left Eye to protest a new company, WorryFree, that promises workers employment, housing, and food for life if they agree to work for the company for life without any salary. And Cash’s colleague Squeeze (Steven Yeun, who had a pretty good 2018 for himself) is actually a union organizer who leads work actions at RegalView. There’s more, but you’re probably getting the idea by now.

Riley is trying to take out a bunch of rabbits with a machine gun here, with entirely predictable results. Unfettered capitalism might be his main target, but he’s also hitting materialism, conscious and subconscious racism, cultural appropriation, worker exploitation, police brutality, police militarization, the dumbing down of American culture, genetic engineering, and a lot more. No film could adequately address that many disparate issues in two hours without turning into a scattershot mess; Terry Gilliam’s Brazil tried to hit fewer than half as many concepts, and was still incomprehensible to large portions of the audience.

One of the keys to effective satire is focus – the satirist picks one target, maybe two at most, and then drills deeply enough to take something essential to that target and use that facet against it. Riley goes the other way here, skimming off the top, and thus relying on superficial depictions of his targets to lampoon them by simply making them more ridiculous. The “white voice” gimmick is the best deployment of this technique, and to Riley’s credit, he doesn’t overuse it – only four characters get white voices at all, and only two get them for more than one scene, while it becomes unremarkable for Cash and his boss upstairs, Mr. _____, after a few conversations. That sort of restraint is lacking elsewhere in the film; the most popular show in the alternate universe of Sorry to Bother You, a game show called “I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me!,” appears repeatedly without ever saying anything that wasn’t apparent the first time Cash and Squeeze watch it on TV at a bar after work.

The film also has one of the worst endings of any movie I’ve seen from 2018; The Wife‘s was worse, since it was the most predictable, and First Reformed‘s was more of a copout, whereas Riley just decides to go full batshit with his conclusion here, introducing a new plot element in the final third of the movie and making it essential to the resolution. (He also loses five points for casting Armie Hammer, who might know his claret from his Beaujolais but is not and will probably never be a good actor, as the CEO of WorryFree.) Riley doesn’t just go over the top in his conclusion – he pole-vaults over the top and clears it by a country mile. The problem with that approach is eventually you have to hit the ground.

I’d rather have a film with too many ideas than a film with none, and Riley has a lot to say here with enough cleverness that I’m still interested in whatever he’s doing next, even though Sorry to Bother You just doesn’t work. The bravura that Riley brings here does not serve him or the film well, and the best of the ideas – runaway capitalism and the economic inequalities it creates – suffers as a result. If Riley gets an editor, or even a voice over his shoulder encouraging him to pull back on the throttle, his vision could still lead to something brilliant down the road. This just wasn’t it.