Movie Review: ‘The Apprentice’

Director: Ali Abbasi

Cast: Sebastian Shaw, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan, Catherine McNally, Charlie Carrick, Ben Sullivan

Plot: Real estate mogul Donald Trump learns some lessons from aggressive lawyer Roy Cohn that see him to success for decades to follow.

Review: This is an odd movie to approach for a review, because it’s rare that we see modern movies that are so blatantly designed as a character assassination. We get some clear parallels, such as Glass Onion, but in this case they’re not using a fictional stand-in. It’s a straight up biopic of Presidential candidate Donald Trump played by Sebastian Shaw (the greatest compliment every given to Trump), and it’s very clearly designed to present him in a negative light.

So what’s the point of that? It’s hard to imagine that there are people who have seen Trump being found guilty of fraud, of being liable in cases of sexual assault, of being accused by dozens of women of abuse, spouting bigoted rhetoric, attempting a coup, the blatant lies and cheat, only for this movie to be the tipping point. Yes, it appears to be an accurate depiction of Trumps early successes and the horrible things he did at the time, but we already know he’s deplorable and gross. The angles taken here seem to be unusual choices, putting away the claws at times when they might have gone for the attacks. Ultimately, it’s the weak narrative that let the film down.

The big moment of the story is Trump learning Cohn’s (Strong) three rules: attack, deny everything and claim victory even if you lose. Seeing Trump take on these rules and learn how to weaponise them to get what he wants is an interesting insight into how he operates. Beyond that, we get a few scenes of his father as abusive, the beginning and end of his relationship with Ivana (Bakalova) and his betrayal of his mentor, Cohn. We jump forward months and years at a time so we can focus on the worst things Trump has done, including turning away his brother when he’s in need, turning Cohn away when he suspects he’s contracted AIDS, and physically abusing Ivana, finalising with Trump getting cosmestic surgery instead of attending Cohn’s memorial.

Whether or not this final point did happen, that Trump skipped Cohn’s funeral, wasn’t something we were able to confirm happened, but the film is framed this way. It feels like it was set up to finish on the shock value inherent in graphic images of liposuction and scalp removal. It feels like a cheap finale, when the ultimate fate of Ivana and the disrepair her grave has fallen into might have carried more emotional impact as she was the most sympathetic character in the story.

We’ve got plenty of gripes with the story being told here, but we were enamoured with the performances. Stan has clearly invested a great deal of time and energy into this role, and captures many physical gestures and expressions that embody a very public figure. He’s not a complex character, but we get a sense of how his environment and influences gave him such a malformed worldview. We expected Strong, as a notoriously aggressive lawyer, would essentially be playing his Succession role again, but he creates a very different performance for Cohn and it’s a filled with nuance that help tell his story without adopting his perspective. Bakalova is still one of the best actors of her generation, and puts in a perfectly tragic depiction of Trump’s first wife. We would have liked to see more focus on the relationships between this characters than the time spent on Trump being generally horrid so the story would emphasise that no-one is exempt from Trump’s narcissistic bulldozing of anyone in his way.

Maybe this would have been better suited to a streaming service, being a neatly packaged biopic that is looking to inform people ahead of the 2024 US election. As it is, there’s not much to encourage people out to cinemas for this one. Watch it for the performances, and if you enjoy Trump based rage-bait, otherwise it isn’t going to be changing minds.

Oh, and don’t vote for that weirdo. He’s fucking gross.

Rating: SIX out of TEN