[SATIRE] Movie Review: Enigma

Scarlett Johansson portrays a heroic Wall Street Journal reporter determined to end a caustic regime

By Ruminato Film Critic Wesley Williams Jennings Bryan Hutchinson XIV

Trigger warning: Like the film, this review consists of raw language and extremely unpleasant subject matter

When Hollywood produces an execrable abomination, a movie reviewer is faced with two choices: ignore it and hope it goes away, or review it and hope its producers are run out of town.

I’m choosing the second option.

The only redeeming quality of this new film from A24 is the always fabulous Scarlett Johansson as a Wall Street Journal reporter who discovers a list of sexual predators who prey on children, and tries vainly to alert a numbed nation.

The list, hidden in a safe by a New York City federal attorney who has just been fired by a sleazy president, is part of a larger stash of files and documentation that leads a population already reeling from a coup d’etat to realize that the man the insurrectionists have installed as president is a serial child predator.

The movie tries to sustain its plot through some ridiculous contrivances, which deserve bullet points:

• We are led to believe that a corrupt president was able to steal an election by snatching a few thousand votes in all seven “swing” states. The voter fraud, we’re led to believe, is only possible because half the nation’s voters vote for a convicted felon and serial sexual abuser with a third-grade education over an intelligent former prosecutor, thus leaving a tiny margin for error on the part of the “good guys,” who themselves are mostly shills for Corporate America.

• The film then tries to sell us on the idea that a morbidly rich Apartheid-loving billionaire from South Africa purchases Twitter, renames it X, and is brought into the new, corrupt administration and given the power to reduce payroll and government programs to almost nothing. He does so, and in a scene reminiscent of a Monty Python skit, is shown in the Oval Office wielding a chainsaw.

• That last bullet point is nothing: the film then features an extended scene showing the billionaire’s three year old son riding his shoulders in the Oval Office and declaring that the corrupt president is not really the president.

• The preposterous plot then travels to a small island off Florida owned by a convicted child sex trafficker who has long had suspected ties to the aforementioned newly installed president, who has, by the way, already been convicted on dozens of felony charges before the election.

• The child trafficker, known only as Epstein, is convicted of his crimes, so he commits suicide by bedsheet in a New York jail cell while awaiting sentencing. But not until a massive set of conspiracy theories, led by the corrupt president’s most loyal followers, accuse the opposition party, this time Democrats, and, specifically, Hillary Clinton, of running a sex trafficking ring out of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor.

• The rich South African billionaire becomes annoyed that a budget bill ends an extended string of corporate welfare gifts for his automotive and space ventures, so he turns on the corrupt president and screams to the president and the billionaire’s newly purchased 200 million Twitter followers, “Pizzagate will end you!”

  I’m out of breath simply reporting this insane plotline, but I’ll soldier on:

• The corrupt president, who by now has mysteriously developed a rabid cult following in the tens of millions, is suddenly faced with a mass exodus of his most devoted followers, who can’t fathom how the conspiracy he created has reversed course.

• We are finally blessed with the presence of Scarlett Johansson trying to save the movie with her convincing portrayal of a Wall Street Journal reporter who discovers a cache of childlike drawings from the president’s early years of association with Epstein. We learn that the friendship between the president and the child sex trafficker is a decades-long one. As his cult gains wind of this, they turn on him with a vengeance.

• The film’s title comes from a series of bizarre communications between the president and Epstein that are accompanied by the president’s childlike drawings. It’s hard to imagine a writer conceiving of such nonsense, yet here we are.

• Spoiler alert: The movie concludes with the president, bloated and barely able to speak an intelligible sentence, on his deathbed and shouting epithets in all caps on a newly formed social network created on his behalf called True Sociopath.

• More spoilers: Ann Dowd, who plays Aunt Lydia on the highly acclaimed Hulu TV series “A Handmaid’s Tale,” plays a witch-like White House Chief of Staff named Susan Wiles, who, it turns out, is the mastermind behind a series of inconcievably awful transgressions by the new administration, including the building of an open air concentration camp in the Florida Everglades called “Alligator Alcatraz.”

I’ll conclude the “review” of this most awful of movie events by simply reporting on the dialog of a meeting between Wiles and other members of the cabinet, each of whom is impossibly unqualified for their positions (we are led to believe that a subservient U.S. Senate, for example, confirms an auctioneer with no experience in taxation as the head of the IRS, among other wildly implausible appointments).

Wiles discovers that as the president lies on his deathbed (we are treated to scenes of him throwing cheeseburgers against the wall in one outburst), evidence mounts that huge celebrations in the streets will unfold across the demoralized nation upon the president’s demise. Wiles sets up a meeting to try to prevent the celebrations.

In yet another preposterous plot wrinkle, the Secretary of Health and Human Services is Robert F. Kennedy Junior (played by Nick Offerman). He and Wiles have a conversation about how they might handle the president’s upcoming demise:

RFK Jr.: “His goiter is blowing up something fierce.”

Wiles: “So, unchanged?”

RFK Jr.: “So is his chronic venous insufficiency.”

Wiles: “That’s not chronic venous insufficiency, you dumb ass. It’s congestive heart failure.”

RFK: “He has thrombulinitis.”

Wiles: “What the fuck is that?”

I must interrupt this with another ridiculous plot twist. The Vice President is the author of Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance. I know. Preposterous. Also, I’m sorry, I am only a humble movie reviewer reporting on what I witnessed on screen.

Vance: “We need to prepare the American public. They seem… happy about this?”

Wiles: “Of course they’re happy, you moron. He’s practically destroyed the nation in six months.”

Vance: “I mean dancing in the streets, happy.”

Wiles: “No shit, Sherlock Holotosis. That’s the entire purpose of this meeting.”

Some guy named Miller wearing a Nazi uniform: “Can’t we just kill them all?”

Wiles: “That’s an option, my sweet.”

Nope. Scarlett Johansson can’t save this one.

Notes

IMDB Image Alt Text:

Fake IMDB graphic featuring the name of the movie, “Enigma,” and Trump looking like Jabba the Hutt. The blurb for the movie says:

“A series of catastrophic events unfolds as a ruthless swindler and sexual predator steals an election and becomes president of the United States. Unable to comprehend the gravity of the situation until it is too late, an entire population discovers its fate rests on the actions of a small team of terrorist rebels with shady and misogynous backgrounds.”

The review scores are bad. The Hollywood Reporter is quoted as saying, “A preposterous premise.”

Image credits: IMDB image created by author using a couple of social media images with no known copyright claims or credits, although the Trump/Yoda image was found on Mark Hamill’s Twitter. Something tells me he won’t submit a take-down request. Scarlett Johansson image is by Gage Skidmore under a Creative Commons license.

Thanks for reading!

Elbows 🇨🇦 Up!

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