Greedy People

Writer: Mike Vukadinovich

Director: Potsy Ponciroli

Mike Vukadinovich’s film Greedy People directed by Potsy Ponciroli does little to allay fears about American police corruption when two small town cops manage to kill an innocent citizen in their own home, steal a million dollars of her money and try to frame a variety of her friends and relatives for the crime. This 105-minute morality tale is never sure enough of its tone, veering wildly between satire and deeply serious drama while keeping the audience in the know about the exact sequence of events means the cover-up and the systematic revenge exacted on each of the characters in turn lacks jeopardy.

On the first day on his new job in a fairly sleepy town, cop Will is excited to hear of a burglary in progress and while his partner Terry is distracted with his mistress, hares off to catch the criminal before a series of mishaps land the partners in hot water. Desperate to cover up their corruption, they hatch a plan to conceal the money and blame someone else, but when Will tells his pregnant wife Paige trust starts to break down between the conspirators.

Greedy People has a lot of different interests to keep track of and in order to generate lots of potential suspects creates an overly complex narrative and lots of characters with dubious principles but all at a surface level. The victim’s sexual peccadilloes lead to a local masseur and a cheating husband, hired hit men and unstable police officers who rapidly go from assuming free coffee and basic adultery to perpetrating even more outrageous crimes to protect their secret. Although the premise feels overly stretched out, the speed at which character corruption takes place suits the escalating thriller but never feels entirely satisfying.

Performances from Himesh Patel as good guy Will who makes a mess he cannot clean up and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as out of control Terry are entertaining enough while Lily James makes the most of a thankless but not so nice pregnant wife role, yet not even the calibre of the cast can resolve the film’s tonal uncertainty and pacing problem. Not even Uzo Aduba as the underwritten but far more interesting police chief who puts the pieces together but lacks enough screentime to really flesh out her instinctual understanding of the town and her colleagues.

Once the film enters its final and rushed crescendo of moral reckoning, it loses the potentially silly tone and descends into violent car chases, rain strewn scenes at gun point and uncharacteristic carelessness from those who have quite deliberately covered up the crime – everything we’ve seen so many times before. Unlike Ridley Scott’s The Counselor which attempted a similar morality tale a decade ago, no one here learns anything and the swift justice leaves no room for regret or for characters to reflect on their atavistic nature, leaving viewers to wonder what the point of any of it might have been.

Greedy Peopleis available on Digital Platforms 23 September. Distributed by Signature Entertainment.