The Apprentice
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The Apprentice movie review
The Apprentice," directed by Ali Abbasi, is a daring, if flawed, attempt to reframe Donald Trump’s rise to power as a twisted take on Frankenstein. It positions Roy Cohn, the infamous lawyer, as the Dr. Frankenstein to Trump’s creation, with Fred Trump also contributing to the monster-making process. The film’s structure is divided into two distinct periods, focusing on Trump’s formative years in the 1970s under Cohn’s tutelage, and then fast-forwarding to the 1980s when Trump has risen to greater prominence. While the film’s concept is provocative, it ultimately struggles to offer a meaningful exploration of its subject.
The film’s first half, set in the 1970s, is its strongest. Sebastian Stan plays a younger, more impressionable Donald Trump, who is molded by Jeremy Strong’s manipulative Roy Cohn. Stan and Strong both give strong performances, with Cohn serving as a ruthless mentor who teaches Trump key survival tactics, which he will later use to rise to fame and power. The film is at its most engaging when it focuses on this relationship, showing how Cohn teaches Trump to “attack, attack, attack,” admit nothing, and claim victory at all costs. These lessons are threaded through the political and business dealings of New York at the time, making for an interesting, if somewhat surface-level, exploration of the forces that shaped Trump.
Maria Bakalova also stands out in a few brief scenes as Ivana Trump, portraying her with more depth than the two-dimensional media caricature often associated with her. But as the film shifts into its second half—now set in the 1980s, with Trump in the spotlight and planning Trump Tower—the narrative loses focus. Key developments in Trump’s character and the fallout from his relationship with Cohn are skipped over, leaving the audience to fill in the gaps between his earlier rise and his full-fledged persona as a real estate mogul. The omission of these developments makes the movie feel incomplete, and much of what could have been rich material is left unexamined.
The film falters further when it tries to reckon with its subject’s larger impact. As Cohn succumbs to AIDS, Trump distances himself from his former mentor, a move that’s portrayed as a moment of betrayal, but the emotional impact of this betrayal is undercut by the lack of development. Cohn’s demise is meant to be tragic, but it’s hard to sympathize with a man who, in this telling, helped create the very monster that eventually abandons him. This dynamic—where we’re asked to feel pity for Cohn as he looks upon his creation—is morally murky at best and feels more like an unfinished subplot than a fully realized emotional arc.
Abbasi’s film leans on a mix of satire, comedy, and drama, but it fails to maintain a cohesive tone. In the second half, the humor becomes broader, the dialogue more on the nose, and the Trump-Cohn relationship takes a backseat to surface-level critiques of Trump’s future political career. The movie drifts into parody at times, referencing MAGA, and there are moments where it feels like a sketch from Saturday Night Live rather than a serious critique. The result is a film that doesn’t seem sure of what it wants to be: a biting satire, a moral critique, or something in between.
Ultimately, "The Apprentice" struggles under the weight of its ambitions. It aims to examine the origins of Trump’s rise through the lens of one powerful, corrupt relationship but stumbles when it fails to connect the dots between its most critical moments. While it raises the idea of Cohn as Trump’s puppet master and the origin of his unyielding business tactics, it doesn’t fully explore the implications of this dynamic. The final takeaway—that there’s no real explanation for Trump other than greed and capitalism—feels like a shallow conclusion for such a complicated figure.
In the end, the film doesn’t seem to know exactly what it wants to say about Trump or his place in American culture. Is it a satire of the American Dream, or a horror story about how that dream became a nightmare? The movie asks these questions but never really answers them, leaving the audience with a shallow portrayal of a man whose impact on politics, business, and society has been anything but superficial. The Apprentice raises intriguing ideas but doesn’t fully capitalize on them, making it feel incomplete and unsatisfying despite its bold premise.
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