Sorry to Bother You

My early thoughts of Boots Riley’s writing and directorial debut, Sorry to Bother You, being a simple capitalism satire was quickly erased by an army of mutated horse people. From a distance, ignoring all the technical issues that plagued this film, the story is fresh and fantastically wild: a poor man starts his job as a telemarketer to gain money for his rent until his coworkers organize an uprising as he is promoted to sell forced slavery and advertising DNA exploitation for the rich. The overarching plot is insane and full of great visuals to show the struggle of being broke and how desperate people are to make a profit. Putting the originality of this writer-director aside, though, this film was jarring and clearly his first film.

What is great about this film is the underlying themes and jokes that rise from them, but they are choked down by the amateur writing and editing that fail to make a fluid progression of a whole story. Scenes awkwardly wait for the transition and then rough cut into a new location, characters appear and disappear with little to no explanation, and at the midpoint of the film it cranks the intensity up to 11, but then fizzles out for thirty minutes before the final climax. I almost checked my watch several times because I had no idea if the film was ending or not; the midpoint of the story was so ambitious and subversive that I thought it was the climax, and then I sat through scene after scene where there is no urgency until the real climax appears, and the final struggle is nothing but a shadow of the revelation I witnessed 40 minutes before. I liked the scenes I was watching; Riley just needs to understand how to connect them to actually make a film instead of a montage of snippets.

The greatest aspect of this film is destroyed through its execution. The symbolism and underlying themes are not beneath the surface. They are exposed right on the screen. This film has no subtlety, not even any attempt to give a narrative meaning to what it is trying to say. Sometimes this approach works, but most of the time I was sitting there thinking “I get it. The rich are selfishly cruel and the poor are desperate enough to do terrible things.” There is nuance to how the audience sees this message, but it is still too loud for them to be fully engaged. For me, it beat me over my head too many times to have an organic appeal.

Apart from the main protagonist, Cash, every side character in this film is a caricature for further satire or humor. Tessa Thompson’s character has several great moments when she plays a performance artist, but when she is in a pointless love triangle that never concludes or amounts to anything important, she physically starts teleporting in and out of scenes so she can add romantic struggle. These side characters are there to introduce conflict and to add jokes, and most of the jokes are great, but when they begin to mold into satire, I never knew when to laugh or reflect. The only truly developed character in this film is Cash, but his impact is lost because the plot is terribly paced with no amount of subtlety to its inner core.

The critics are praising this film as if it is a masterpiece; it is nowhere close to perfect, but Riley deserves credit in his unique eye and bold ambition. He is definitely an upcoming director that deserves all the attention, but he has to polish his technical skills as well as his screenplays before he deserves any true mantle of greatness. Overall, it has concrete visuals and great jokes, so if you want to have a fun time and do not care about obvious, forced satire, then you will enjoy this film.

Story Rating: 3/10

Character Rating: 3/10