Greed review: Steve Coogan is wasted in a cartoonish satire that can’t figure out its tone

Dir: Michael Winterbottom. Starring: Steve Coogan, Isla Fisher, David Mitchell, Asa Butterfield, Sophie Cookson, Shirley Henderson, Stephen Fry. 15 cert, 104 mins

Greed looks so promising. The poster shows Steve Coogan lying back, Sexy Beast-style, with titanium-white gnashers bright against an easyJet-orange fake tan, his yacht reflected in his sunglasses. “The Devil Is In The Retail,” says the strapline. Well done that copywriter. But like one of those fast-fashion tops that shimmers on the hanger but falls apart as soon as you get it home, Greed is a botch job, which wastes a good idea and an excellent cast.

It’s an account of the life of Philip Green, so thinly fictionalised that you wonder why they bothered with the pretence. The similarities are relentless. Like Green, Sir Rich “Greedy” McCreadie leaves his boarding school early and goes to work to help out his mother. Like Green, he builds a high-street clothing empire with low guile and cheap south Asian manufacturing. Like Green, he pays his wife (Isla Fisher) and himself large dividends from their companies while trashing their value. Green held a toga party on Cyprus for his 50th birthday party. McCreadie is having a toga party on Mykonos. And so on. If the Topman tyrant wanted to sue, he surely could.

The centrepiece of the party is a mock amphitheatre, where celebrations will climax with gladiatorial combat featuring a real-life lion. Days before the event, however, Syrian refugees have set up camp on the beach and the arena is still a plywood skeleton. The Greek and Bulgarian builders fail to appreciate the urgency of the situation, despite the exhortations of their supervisor, Sam (Tim Key). Rome wasn’t built in a day, says one. This is only a small bit of Rome, comes the reply, and they’ve had 10 days. Not a bad joke, but the tone is jarring.

The build-up to the party alternates with McCreadie’s career told in flashback. Sony apparently thought it was getting a knockabout comedy. The writer-director Michael Winterbottom thought he was making a biting satire. The confusion shows. On the one hand, the film yearns to be a British version of Adam McKay’s The Big Short and Vice, which use formal experimentation and humour to explain the financial crisis and the career of Dick Cheney. But where those films had genuine moral outrage as ballast, Greed can only manage hectoring bluster about global capitalism in the closing credits.

It doesn’t help that much of the film, especially the party scene, feels like a “best of British comedy” variety show. Here’s David Mitchell as the bumbling journalist, Nick, sent to write a biography of McCreadie. There’s Chabuddy G from People Just Do Nothing as a lion tamer. Here are a succession of celebrity cameos: James Blunt, Keira Knightley, Stephen Fry, Chris Martin. Ollie Locke, from Made in Chelsea, plays a reality TV star whose big reveal is that he’s gay, similar to Locke’s character arc in season one of the structured reality show, which aired a mere nine years ago. What are they sending up? If it wasn’t confusing enough already, the late Caroline Flack appears in an early scene to introduce McCreadie before he presents himself with a novelty check for £1.2bn. What was intended as comic cameo acquires a tragic, ghoulish edge.

Coogan’s McCreadie is sketched in outline, a pair of teeth at the front of a hot air balloon. His convoluted and unhappy family has promise, especially Sex Education’s Asa Butterfield as unhappy son, Finn, but they are never given any room to develop. The Trip works so well because the characters of “Steve Coogan” and “Rob Brydon” are so fully developed that it’s often unclear where reality ends and fiction begins.

Greedy is never more than a cartoon, but if Green’s actions merit our moral outrage, the man responsible deserves to be taken seriously. Even if we are not meant to believe in McCreadie’s brilliance as a retailer, we ought to see a little chutzpah, or believe in the terror he can inspire. Scenes where he bawls out employees are played for laughs rather than fear. What ought to be plausible horror descends into glossy farce. As a result, when real disaster strikes at one of McCreadie’s factories in Sri Lanka, it has nowhere near the requisite gravitas. Greed wants to have its cheap giggles and its Serious Message, and fails at both.