Prime Video’s latest offering, The Consultant, is perfectly fine. No more, no less. It is a dark workplace comedy-thriller satire on capitalism with supernatural undertones, or possibly overtones. It’s a bit like watching a small mammal press levers for rewards in a lab experiment. Will the viewer like this? Or this? What about this? It’s just having a go and hoping something good happens.
The first thing we see in The Consultant is a group of middle-schoolers visiting cool gaming company CompWare, only for one of their pre-pubescent number to draw a gun on the founder/CEO Sang (Brian Yoon) and shoot him dead. Blimey! Perhaps it’s a biting critique of gun laws, too. Or school trips.
Before the blood is even off the walls (CompWare’s cleaning service does not cover such eventualities – capitalism! Satire!), a mysterious, immaculately coiffed, suited and booted stranger has turned up bearing the name Regus Patoff (Christoph Waltz, doing his customary unsettling Christopher Walken/Christoph Waltz thing) and a contract appointing him controller of all things in Sang’s absence.
Gosh, he is immaculate, unsettling and mysterious. He is also super-ruthless, firing remote workers who cannot return to the office within an hour (including a wheelchair-using employee who misses the cutoff by seconds), and another for smelling of “putrid fruit”. He also has access to multitudinous personal details about them all from a “records room” they never realised existed. Hmm.
Sang’s creative liaison (though Patoff wonders about the validity of the role and its appellation because More Satire) Elaine – Brittany O’Grady, last seen as Sydney Sweeney’s BFF in the first season of The White Lotus – and stoner-slacker-coder Craig (Nat Wolff) start secretly investigating their strange new boss online and find he barely exists. Though he was signatory to a similar contract with a prosthetics manufacturer who then ended up decapitated (Thriller!).
The plot thickens. Or at least the string of events larded with clues as to the real nature of the increasingly manipulative and malevolent – one might almost say DIABOLIC – Regus Patoff gets longer. Sang’s mother (Gloria John), who is technically now the owner of his company, arrives from Korea but never makes it to the hotel Patoff is supposed to check her into. Decided to go straight home, he says. Foul play, thinks Elaine. Thriller, thinks the audience.
Patoff enmeshes Elaine and Craig further and further in his morally compromising web, probing their weaknesses, tempting them with the fulfilment of their hearts’ desires, all under the guise of making the company a more efficient machine and fulfilling Sang’s purported ambitions for it. The fact that the pair have seen a tape of the new guy requiring Sang to literally and metaphorically swallow some nasty business during an unsolicited meeting before his death armours them less strongly against Patoff’s blandishments than you might think. But maybe forcible fellatio is now de rigueur in LA and tech firms. I’m very out of the loop.
Many questions. But all, I suspect, with answers, and not very complex ones at that. That – along with the spooky basement records room opened by a key with a giant brass keyring stamped “RECORDS”, and a decadent members-only nightclub that has transformed into generic office space by morning and assorted other hokum essentials – is what makes it fun, and perfectly, perfectly fine. As I said: no more, no less.
The Consultant is on Prime Video now
