THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME - Mark Reviews Movies

The Phoenician Scheme, Focus Features

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 29, 2025

The plot of The Phoenician Scheme revolves around trade negotiations, percentages, construction timelines, and other such assorted matters, as well as a little government espionage, acts of personal backstabbing, and assassination attempts. If it seems like serious or even impenetrable business, that's partly why writer/director Wes Anderson's latest film is so surprisingly delightful. The confounding nature of the plotting here allows us to mostly ignore it. Instead, the filmmaker encourages us to observe his cast of eccentric characters talking, in action, and quietly wrestling with the story's bigger theme.

That last part will come later, of course, even if it is almost immediately on the mind of the film's anti-hero protagonist. He's Zsa-zsa Korda (an intentionally and admirably deadpan Benicio Del Toro, who lets his fellow actors have the more obvious fun), an international business tycoon who has homes and estates in several countries but citizenship in not a single one of them. That makes his work easier, perhaps, and his professional ethics far more—let's say—flexible.

By the end of the first act, Korda mundanely announces that his latest scheme, a collection of infrastructure projects across the fictional land of Phoenicia, uses slave labor and is benefiting from a local famine. He started the famine, by the way, because desperate people are more willing to negotiate and eager to do whatever it takes to stop such a catastrophe. Korda does, however, draw the line at personally killing anyone, although his daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a novitiate nun, points out that moral qualm doesn't exclude him from hiring other people to murder those who get in his way. The man denies it, until he no longer can once the daughter sees too much of his personality and his business tactics.

Everything here starts, however, with the latest assassination attempt on Korda, involving a bomb on his private plane. By the end of the ordeal, his personal secretary will be blown in half by the blast, while Korda ejects the pilot for daring to counter his instructions, and Korda will almost miraculously survive his sixth plane crash. This one was his closest call, it seems, because he has visions of a Biblical troupe in the afterlife discussing the kind of man he was and the kind of life he lived. If he didn't regain consciousness, the conversation probably wouldn't have gone in his favor.

After his near-death experience, Korda's work continues. He enlists Liesl to become his heir on a "temporary" basis—not so much for this religious woman to decide if she wants to be associate with such dealings, but for the father to make sure she'll go along with him. He hires a new personal secretary in Bjorn (Michael Cera, perfectly fitting into Anderson's ever-growing troupe of actors), the tutor of his seven sons by three wives, all of whom died in similarly mysterious ways, or through adoption, which he argues is akin to gambling on at least one of them better fulfilling his legacy.

With them, Korda sets out to renegotiate income deals with several folks involved in the plan. He hopes to get a better return on his investment after the intelligence leaders of every developed country in the world, who all are divided on everything except their shared animosity toward the magnate, plot to raise the price on a single bolt with the aim of making Korda's project too expensive to proceed.

Anderson, of course, has a particular style of filmmaking that's well-known to anyone who has seen even one of his films—the exacting staging in shots in which the frame almost serves like a proscenium arch, production design and visual effects that look or are handcrafted, a dry sense of humor to match the characters' matter-of-fact manners and almost serve counter to how intricately, lovingly assembled every element of the film can be. Nothing about that changes here, except that it's in service of what at times plays like a straightforward thriller (complete with Alexandre Desplat's musical score offering a staccato theme of suspense whenever our morally challenged anti-hero is in peril).

As a result, the tone of this one feels slightly distinct from the filmmakers' other works, despite the abundance of strange characters and gags, from the start (That first scene on the plane has probably the bloodiest bit of violence in Anderson's oeuvre, which makes it a relatively considerable shock). That mood does a lot, however, to keep Korda and his mounting crisis of conscience—guided by his faithful daughter, who starts going through her own change in behavior—grounded. It's especially important for where this story finally goes, considering how many quirky characters and scenarios the rest of it presents.

Those characters include ones vital to the scheme's success played by Scarlett Johannson (as a woman who complete understands how convenient her marriage to Korda would be for the both of them), Mathieu Amalric (as a nightclub owner who worries more about his joint than losing money), Jeffrey Wright (as a wealthy sailor whose kindness only seems to be tested by Korda), and the pairing of Bryan Cranston and Tom Hanks (as businessmen whose negotiating specialty is shooting trick shots in basketball). The rest of the cast is rounded out by Riz Ahmed (as a very proper prince), Richard Ayoade (as a jungle-based revolutionary), and Benedict Cumberbatch (as a half-brother with a Rasputin-like appearance and an attitude to match), and that doesn't even get into those playing the heavenly figures from Korda's visions.

As all of that complexity unfolds, The Phoenician Scheme is ultimately about a different sort of negotiation—of what it means to be good and to live well. Anderson gives us distinct extremes in his two main characters, and that story leads to a single shot, set in a quiet and intimate location that's like nothing else in the rest of the film, of warm, surprisingly affecting simplicity.

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