Sorry to Bother You

It’s a roiling mix of wry race comedy, economy-grade dystopian sci-fi, and Silicon Valley satire. Also, it's as funny and as caustic as hell.

Exploding with infectious originality, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You may be the most wonderfully bizarre film of 2018.

It works fine as an outrageous comedy, but the perceptive commentary will likely give it staying power. This is the fearless satire that America desperately needs right now.

No matter how bizarre Sorry to Bother You becomes (and it goes in some very strange directions), it doesn’t entirely lose its focus.

Ultimately, Sorry to Bother You does what every great first film should: it heralds the arrival of an exciting new talent and generates enthusiasm for what’s going to be in that second feature.

The picture has the rage and energy of early Spike Lee films, and the same “How do I END this?” third act failings. I wanted to love it, but it stalls long before it takes a turn towards something so bizarre it’ll be taught in film schools for decades, “How NOT to give your sci-fi satire a climax.”

Riley so wants to make strong criticisms about everything from racial stereotyping to corporate greed that he forgets the need for a real person to root for at the story’s core.

this is a insane/the best movie of 2018, i really love the story, the characters, the crazy abou everything here

This twisted tale of ladder climbing and soul searching in a call center is like Severance meets Atlanta, with a big helping of Everything Everywhere All at Once. It’s got the clinical fluorescence of Severance, ever-so-slightly skewing a cubical farmers' work environment into something darker. Call it team-building with a creepy ulterior air. It shares a cynical, world-weary gallows humor with Atlanta, complete with a dejected, self-loathing protagonist who glumly accepts life’s absurdities to pay this month’s bills. Donald Glover was actually cast in that role before agreeing to portray Lando in Solo: A Star Wars Story. And as for EEAaO? Well, let’s just say it gets weird. Aggressively, garishly, grotesquely weird. Of course, Sorry to Bother You predates two of the above references, which means those influences probably point in the opposite direction. Still, the common DNA is tough to ignore. These stories all share a jaded, angry view of the world and use noisy, ridiculous metaphors to voice their concerns. Here, we’re talking about class division. In this (not so?) alternate near-future, there’s never been a broader gap between the haves and the have-nots. You’re either living in opulence on the top floor or you’re contemplating a form of widely-advertised indentured servitude. In that atmosphere, the lure of being plucked from squalor can be pretty seductive. Maybe even tempting enough to resign your ethos and chase the bag at all costs. Cassius Green (subtle symbolism there) is our protagonist, a black, sleepwalking stiff who hits paydirt when he starts faking a white voice to make cold calls. Soon, he’s promoted to a mysterious elite level, where gilded elevators compliment his virility and his only coworker also uses a put-on accent. There, the party keeps rolling until he suddenly finds himself in too deep, with a measure of scornful public notoriety to boot. I loved this setup, loved the execution and groaned when it lost the plot in the third act. So long as it remains a quirky, focused story about a faded American Dream and the pathetic rat race it’s inspired, this is sharp, witty, fiery social satire with a distinct voice. As the running time extends, though, the plot bloats and spreads until it becomes something completely different. It’s like the crew realized they’d made one strong point and then decided to make twenty more while they were at it. The humor is good (David Cross and Patton Oswalt, as the dubbed white guy voices, are absolutely perfect), the ideas are good, the acting and directing and effects are good; it’s just messy and tries to do too much. To force-feed every allegory until all its problems with modern society have been redressed, all at once. Pretty ambitious for 112 minutes.

I'm all for quirky and off beat, but this didn't quite grab me. It seemed to be taking on every social issue and in doing so became a bit confused at times in the story it was trying to tell.

i didn't understand this movie at all and i feel bad for it. Every performance was great by default but this movie is just too surreal for me. It is an interesting concept, and i praise Boots Reily for it, but it was just too weird and strange.

It started out well enough as a pretty OK satire on call centers but half way through the satire shifted to something more sinister. The first sign was probably when Danny Glover came across as creepy with the "white voice". Then the sinister eventually managed to become completely far fetched. So, rest assured that the movie escalates a lot.