'Mountainhead' review: Brutal farce from 'Succession' creator Jesse Armstrong

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Riots are raging across central Europe and south Asia, in response to an artificial intelligence contagion spreading fake news and videos. Meanwhile, a small group of billionaires — one of them responsible for this contagion — get together at the mountainside estate of Hugo Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman) for a fun boy's weekend of poker, drinking, snowmobiling and counting their money. There's Randall (Steve Carell), self-proclaimed "dark money Gandalf" with deep political and financial connections who also has advanced cancer; Jeff (Ramy Youssef) whose AI company holds the solution for this misinformation crisis; and Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the world's richest man, whose company just released a new feature in beta form that's fueling this crisis.

Hugo, AKA "Souper" — the lone millionaire of this group — has named his mountain aerie in honor of Ayn Rand's 1943 novel, "The Fountainhead," about the primacy of individual achievement. But his friends are dismissive — "who designed this? Ayn Bland?," someone asks.

Jesse Armstrong, creator of "Succession," wrote and directed (his debut) this movie.

MY SAY "Mountainhead" is like the spawn of some David Mamet and Armando Iannucci collaboration — "Veep"-meets-"Glengarry Glenn Ross" or maybe "The Death of Stalin" and "Speed-the-Plow." The language is brutal, smashmouth, rapid-fire, withering and (above all) hilarious. There's a hint of murder in the thin mountain air because murder seems inevitable, or at least justifiable. Only a few women drift onto the screen, but in those fleeting appearances, their facial expressions speak for the rest of us — horror, disbelief, revulsion. No one loves these guys, not their girlfriends, maybe not even their mothers. Who could blame them really?

And this is fun? Well, yes, and funny too. In part that's because Armstrong never makes these four tech overlords fully relatable. They're comic types rather than people with actual backstories or (for that matter) actual moms. The real-world humans they're supposed to be — you can easily pick the names because they're in the news all the time — never come into focus, and probably aren't meant to. Instead, Randall, Souper, Venis and Jeff are exactly who we want them to be: Fast-talkers, depraved narcissists, moral vacuums, lost souls.

They're easy to feel superior to, easier to laugh at. In the best scene of the movie, set on a remote mountaintop, they howl to the gods they worship — "the marquee of moola, the North Star of net worth" — then scrawl the number of their many billions on their bare chests with a red marker. Hardly masters of the universe, they're the four stooges.

But Armstrong does have a larger point to this farce, with its fictional stand-ins for Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Altman, which is essentially the same one he made with "Succession." We've all surrendered our digital lives to forces now even beyond the control of those who created them in the first place. These four have no idea what the consequences of their actions are, and don't really care — "di minimus," someone insists, or "it's good for the ecosystem [and] a controlled burn." These tech bros know they can hide on this mountaintop for the weekend, or on their private jets when they leave, or maybe get downloaded to the grid before they die — Randall's fantasy, by the way, which Venis assures him will happen once "we [test] a mouse, a pig, and 10 morons."

But they can't hide forever because — to paraphrase that line from the poem — "mere anarchy has been loosed upon the world," and they're the ones who loosed it. As such, "Mountainhead" is a tragedy as much as comedy, whose end has yet to be written. It will not be a happy one, Armstrong reasonably insists.

BOTTOM LINE Brutal farce, with Carell's (arguably) single best performance since "The Office."