The Consultant Review: Christoph Waltz Fails to Sell a Subpar Corporate Mystery
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The post The Consultant Review: Christoph Waltz Fails to Sell a Subpar Corporate Mystery appeared first on Consequence.
The Pitch: Imagine this: A hot new tech company suddenly finds itself with a new leader. No one knows much about him, but he’s mercurial, impulsive, and gives off an air of efficacious politeness while also seemingly running the business into the ground. Oh, and he immediately fires anyone working from home if they can’t race to the physical office within an hour of announcing.
No, he’s not Elon Musk. But by the time you finish Season 1 of Prime Video’s new puzzle-box thriller The Consultant, you might wish for something as biting as a takedown of tech’s most visibly idiotic goofball.
Adapted from the novel by Bentley Little, The Consultant sees LA-based mobile game company CompWare reeling from the sudden death of their young, temperamental CEO Sang Woo. But the very next day, a mysterious besuited figure named Regus Patoff (Christoph Waltz) shows up and plops himself down at the head chair. He’s the new corporate consultant, whose job it is to streamline, innovate, build synergy, and all that good jargonistic stuff.
However, as profits rise, so do tensions, as his results come from Machiavellian manipulation of their glass-enclosed workspace: He pits employees against one another to claim a newly-vacated corner office, and commissions a fully-nude statue of Sang Woo for the employees to “worship.”
Two of the company’s employees, Sang’s former assistant creative liaison Elaine (Brittany O’Grady) and slacker-stoner programmer Craig (Nat Wolff), seem to be the only ones who realize anything’s amiss. Who is this guy, really? What does he want with the company? And why does the glass under his feet creak so when he attempts to climb the stairs?
The Consultant (Prime Video)
Hostile Takeovers: It’s hard not to compare The Consultant to last year’s stellar Apple TV+ series Severance, which also took on the vagaries of stifling corporate culture but with far greater sophistication than here. In both series, the workplace is something to be feared, a hellhole in which you surrender your time, youth, and energy to a manufactured hierarchy far more likely to grind you down than lift you up.
But where Severance explored that through the childlike wonder of its memory-bisected workers, a stellar ensemble whose momentum carries you throughout the series, The Consultant feels like someone tried to make Severance in the post-Lost era of the aughts. There’s a central puzzle (who is Regus Patoff, and why does every company for which he consults leads to the death of the CEO?), with a few surreal twists here and there. Still, it feels like it’s chasing the feeling of a mystery rather than having a worthwhile mystery to unravel.
Breaking the Glass Ceiling: To its credit, The Consultant mostly feels like a vehicle for Waltz to strut his stuff (he’s also an executive producer), and in that respect, it mostly succeeds. Just as he did in Inglourious Basterds and dozens of roles since, he infuses Regus with an air of pleasant mystique, navigating lyrical dialogue with almost mathematical precision and charisma.
He’s Hans Landa if the guy had read Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, then American Psycho right afterwards: A ruthless martinet who hides his manipulative decrees behind a singsong tonality and marionette-like posture. But given that he’s more enigma than man, there’s not much under the surface to Regus, which limits what Waltz can do with him — head-scratching alienness can only take you so far.
The Consultant (Prime Video)
It doesn’t help, of course, that the two protagonists tasked with solving the mystery of Mr. Patoff are just as thinly-sketched, without Waltz’s signature brio to wallpaper over the flaws. Wolff and O’Grady acquit themselves well enough, but their characters are so thinly-sketched that they can’t sell their turn-on-a-dime motivations. Is Elaine Regus’ greatest enemy or his potential protege? Does Craig want to be molded into a new man under Regus’ tutelage, or will he collapse into conspiratorial rabbit holes? There’s something there about the way Regus’ off-kilter management style destroys and reforges his employees into better workers (to hell with their humanity). But it’s deployed in too scattershot a matter to land.
The Verdict: Granted, The Consultant‘s weirdness ramps up in its latter half, and Waltz gets plenty of real estate to Do His Thing, dispensing subtle threats with that Cheshire Cat grin of his. But The Consultant doesn’t have much to say about its satirical targets and the few characters who orbit Waltz get trampled underfoot by his larger-than-life energy.
Creator Tony Basgallop, who also created Apple TV+’s stellar Servant, seems to love disrupting hermetically-sealed environments with intruders whose nature borders on the supernatural. But The Consultant doesn’t benefit from the former’s impressive visual style (Matt Shakman’s direction in the pilot is too cold and clinical, despite ostensibly fitting the setting), or the high camp tone of its entire ensemble. Instead, The Consultant is one show you can easily downsize from your media diet.
Where’s It Playing? The Consultant wobbles its way up the stairs to your Amazon Prime Video account starting February 24th.
Trailer:
The Consultant Review: Christoph Waltz Fails to Sell a Subpar Corporate Mystery
Clint Worthington
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