I would say this was an odd choice for director Michael Winterbottom but who knows what a Michael Winterbottom film is – the director is nothing but eclectic. Even if you look at only his last five films there is much diversity to be found. The Look Of Love was nothing like Everyday, which had little similarities with Trishna, which had zero in common with The Killer Inside Me, which was a world away from Genova. Winterbottom tackling a Michael Moore-esque documentary about the recession with Russell Brand ranting away at the camera may be exactly up the director’s street. It’s impossible to tell.
But Winterbottom’s films have a tendency to be up and down and The Emperor’s New Clothes, which has Russell Brand loose his mile-a-minute verbals on the bankers and banking system that has devastated a generation, is unfortunately not his best work despite best intentions. The problem is stated by Brand in one of his opening lines, that this has been said a lot of times before. Indeed it has, Russell. Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job and Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story being just two. But rant on in any case – I do enjoy a good one.
Brand rails against Thatcherism, Reagonomics, Milton Friedman and any banker. When he’s not shouting at the camera (the most important words annoyingly superimposed to underline the point), he’s back in his old stomping ground of Grays, Essex; playing the Ordinary Bloke he’s in the kitchens and sitting rooms of the impoverished and struggling, sipping coffee and pulling kids onto his lap. He entertains schoolchildren with his simple breakdown the wages of the 1% versus everyone else. Is that fair, he asks. No, they scream. While it’s easy to get on board with Russell and his noble pursuit of the redistribution of wealth, but if everyone was granted the two-hundred grand or that Grant knows the rich can afford, the likes of your Hunky Dory’s cheese & onion crisps would go from one euro to five or six overnight, wouldn’t it?
Brand’s tendency to fall back on Moore’s knack for grandstanding come undone as his attempts to march into Lloyds and other banks and demand answers from upstairs are reduced to having a go at the security in reception, and driving around London with a Shop A Banker ad on a trailer. And there is no visual pizazz. It rambles and loses its train of thought (or at least I lost the train of thought) despite Brand’s typically enthusiastic delivery.