’Mountainhead’ Too Bro Heavy


Mountainhead wants to bite, but ends up gumming its audience.

Jesse Armstrong’s satire of tech titans marooned in a snowbound mansion arrives with all the right ingredients: a sharp-witted script, a killer cast, and a premise ripped from the headlines. But somehow, the thing never quite cooks.

Venis Parish (Cory Michael Smith), the jittery creator of the misinformation-spewing social platform Traam, holes up with fellow billionaires Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef), Hugo “Souper” Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman), and Randall Garrett (Steve Carell) as society crumbles outside. The setup promises dark laughs and savage skewering.

It delivers some.

Armstrong’s dialogue crackles early. The actors land their lines with deadpan precision, and there are stretches where the film hums with the energy of Succession at its best. You sense what Mountainhead could’ve been.

But the characters drift toward cartoon. Their odd behavior, intended as a critique of tech-world narcissism, too often strains believability. Schwartzman’s Van Yalk, in particular, feels plucked from a different movie entirely—his manic energy clashing with the film’s cooler tone.

The story, too, loses its grip. What starts as a tight chamber piece begins to fray in the second half, collapsing into broad farce. The satire gets blunt. The tension leaks away.

Visually, the film does little to compensate. The single setting grows stale. By the final scenes, even the actors seem boxed in.

Which is a shame, because buried here is a sharper movie—one that skewers tech arrogance without slipping into caricature, one that sustains its bite from first frame to last.

As it stands, Mountainhead wobbles. Not a disaster. Not a triumph. Just another would-be satire stuck halfway up the hill.

Hollywood’s Villain Complex


Who can Hollywood still villainize?

It’s a question worth asking.

Every era of filmmaking has leaned on certain “safe” villains. In the ’30s and ’40s, it was Axis soldiers. The ’50s leaned on communists. The ’70s and ’80s often made street criminals and minorities the face of evil. The ’90s favored Arab terrorists. For decades, it was understood—sometimes openly, sometimes quietly—who it was okay to demonize on screen.

That map has changed.

Today’s Hollywood walks a tighter wire. The global box office matters more than ever. Audiences are more diverse, more vocal, more sensitive to stereotypes. Studios, facing both social pressure and international markets, tread carefully when choosing villains.

Who’s off the table?

Racial minorities. Audiences won’t tolerate stereotypes without critique. Arab villains, largely avoided. Muslim characters, written with care or sidestepped entirely.

LGBTQ characters are no longer cast as coded villains. Religious groups are tricky—cults or abusive leaders may be fair game, but not broad portrayals of faith.

Foreign nationals? Studios covet the Chinese market, so Chinese villains have vanished. Russians still show up, but often as rogue agents, not national stereotypes.

So who’s left?

The ultra-rich. Corrupt billionaires and tech moguls are open targets. Films like Glass Onion and series like Succession skewer the elite with relish.

Corporations and CEOs remain reliable antagonists. Avatar, Don’t Look Up, Iron Man 3—all frame corporations as engines of greed and destruction.

Nazis are a perennial fallback. No one protests their depiction. Franchises like Indiana Jones and Captain America are built on it.

Human traffickers, serial killers, and terrorists—provided they’re written as individuals, not as broad groups—remain common. Think Taken.

Corrupt government figures thrive in thrillers. Mission Impossible, Bourne, Jack Ryan, and Homeland continue to mine this ground.

Aliens, robots, and supernatural forces provide clean, uncontroversial conflict. The Terminator, A Quiet Place, Transformers, Marvel’s cosmic villains—all work here.

White supremacists and domestic extremists appear more frequently, particularly in prestige TV. BlacKkKlansman, Justified, and Law & Order: Organized Crime go there.

What’s most common now is the systemic villain. The enemy isn’t a person. It’s corruption. It’s capitalism. It’s the system.

Sometimes this works. Parasite used class tension as its engine. The Big Short exposed systemic rot with sharp teeth.

But often it breeds sameness. Another greedy CEO. Another evil algorithm. Another faceless senator.

Villains need to evolve as audiences do. The trick is keeping them human, fresh, and sharp.

Because the worst thing a villain can be isn’t offensive.

It’s boring.