HBO’s Mountainhead will make you laugh as the world burns

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Over Succession’s four seasons, series creator Jesse Armstrong made a name for himself as television’s go-to chronicler of the uber-rich. The HBO show depicted the inner workings of a powerful, Murdoch-esque media clan and the way its members lived, travelled, celebrated and humiliated one another. It was a tantalizing look at what it might be like to have wealth so profound that it sets you apart from everyone and gives you the power to influence politics worldwide.

Now, after two years off the air, Armstrong returns to HBO on May 31 with a new movie, Mountainhead, which almost feels like it could be a Succession spinoff. (He says he even contemplated having ATN, Succession’s Fox-like news channel, playing in the background.) The cool color palette is the same; so are the zingers. Nicholas Britell is back to compose the score. Instead of media scions, however, Armstrong has turned his attention to the newest generation of powerful elites — tech bros — and raised the absurdity of the scenario.

And while Mountainhead can be a bit slapdash at times, it once again proves that if you want a glimpse at the masters of the universe — one that will make you wince and laugh in equal measure — Armstrong is your man.

Mountainhead came together quickly. Armstrong cast the movie while writing it in January and February of this year and shot for just five weeks in the spring. On-screen you can feel the urgency as well as the messiness that comes with such a compressed timeline. This is an extremely timely film about the dangers of artificial intelligence, the world falling apart and powerful men who care only about their own portfolios. It could be tighter, but it’s still ridiculously entertaining.

The plot revolves around a boys trip to the title’s namesake location — a Utah estate owned by Jason Schwartzman’s Hugo Van Yalk and named for The Fountainhead. (One of his buddies jokes that it was designed by “Ayn Bland.”) Hugo, known to his pals as “Souper” or “Soups,” is the founder of a mental health app more interested in hooking users than actually solving mental health crises and the least wealthy of the group, which means he is mocked for only have a net worth in the hundreds of millions.

The rest are billionaires. There’s “Papa Bear” Randall, the elder statesman hiding health issues, played by Steve Carell, and Ramy Youssef’s Jeff, the most conscientious of the gang, who still believes his tech can be used for good. But the biggest whale in this toxic foursome is Venis, an Elon Musk-Mark Zuckerberg hybrid portrayed with an odious air by Cory Michael Smith. In the opening moments of the film, Venis launches an AI update to the software of Traam, his Facebook-like social media platform, called “F***” but spelled with an extra “u,” which is part of the gag.

The explicative serves to highlight his obnoxiousness, but it’s also apt in another way. Essentially, Venis has created a fake-news machine, and almost as soon as he arrives at Mountainhead, it’s clear his latest creation is sowing worldwide chaos. People are using its functions to falsify images, resulting in murders and coups. While this could ostensibly put a damper on the four friends’ poker night, instead it turns into an opportunity, as the men start to strategize on how to use this instability to their advantage.

Jeff also has an AI tool, which has more guardrails on it — a “filter for nightmares,” as he puts it. Venis wants Jeff to sell it to him, to help solve the global crisis he helped create; Jeff sees more money in keeping it close. But quickly the scheming inside this austere but somehow tacky mansion — there’s a bowling alley downstairs — starts to move beyond simple dealmaking. Lives are on the line inside and outside the structure. Left alone to their own devices, the men grow increasingly deluded about their own power, and Mountainhead goes from satire to a more overt critique of the greed that’s currently shaping our world.

The actors have a great time sinking their teeth into this fantasy. Schwartzman is hilarious as Soups, who has a massive inferiority complex that the others fuel. Carell takes on a professorial air as Randall, who quotes philosophers to support his own self-interest, which involves preserving his consciousness after his death. And Youssef is endearing as the closest thing we have to a “good guy” — who also happens to be a megalomaniac. Smith is perhaps the least famous of the bunch but the standout of the cast, his face oozing smarm as the loathsome Venis.

The shagginess of the plot starts to weigh things down as the movie heads toward its conclusion. Certain moments, especially those related to the characters’ outside lives, are underdeveloped, and there’s an immediacy to Armstrong’s satire that’s almost impulsive. But the anger that spurred Mountainhead’s creation is also its best quality. Armstrong is pissed off and has decided to channel that into brutal jokes. If we can’t laugh at these people, what else can we do?