The Apprentice (2024)

I was really quite disappointed with this. It focusses on the rise of Donald Trump, and in that role Sebastian Stan proves quite effective at mimicking some of the famous mannerisms of the man himself. The facial expressions and the habit of repeating himself to thrust home his point are well captured by this performance. The rest of it, though, came across as little better than crude, occasionally violent, speculation centred around his relationship with the celebrated, and much feared, attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) whose thinly disguised homosexuality proves to be a more telling indictment of a New York that was beginning to come to terms with AIDS. Trump's rise from wealth to greater wealth and prosperity is skirted over too superficially with little meat put on the bones of his property acquisitions, developments and battles with an Ed Koch-led city hall, and it's all presented a bit too episodically weakly. Maria Bakalova acquits herself well enough as Ivana but as to the drama concerning the rest of his family, that's undercooked and I struggled to identify the accent(s) that seemed to be coming from his mother (Catherine McNally) as the importance of that torrid family unit struggles to impact on the story. For me, Strong steals his scenes and delivers well as the manipulative and scheming lawyer with few scruples, but the rest of this is all a bit of a soap that will probably polarise opinion as effectively as does Donald Trump himself.