The Apprentice (2024)

Canada, Denmark, Ireland, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States of America

Drama, History

Gidden Media, Scythia Films, Profile Pictures, Tailored Films, Film Institute, Film i Väst, Head Gear Films, Metrol Technology, Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland, AC Films, Wild7 Films, RocketScience, Rich Spirit

Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan, Catherine McNally, Charlie Carrick

Ali Abbasi

Gabriel Sherman

Taglines: An American horror story.

rape, corruption, politics, 1970s, biography, based on true story, misogyny, marital rape, mentor protégé relationship, real estate, degenerate, 1980s, absurd, audacious, awestruck, bold, donald trump

A young Donald Trump, eager to make his name as a hungry scion of a wealthy family in 1970s New York, comes under the spell of Roy Cohn, the cutthroat attorney who would help create the Donald Trump we know today. Cohn sees in Trump the perfect protégé—someone with raw ambition, a hunger for success, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to win.

Reviews:

Author: Geronimo1967
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.