The Apprentice
Daniel

Review by Daniel Patron

The Apprentice 2024

★★★★

Watched Nov 02, 2024

"Rule 3, this is the most important rule of all: No matter what happens, no matter what they say about you, no matter how beaten you are, you claim victory. Never admit defeat!"

In 1973, a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan), son of real estate mogul Fred Trump, meets infamous attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). Since his father is investigated for discrimination by the federal government, Trump asks Cohn for help. Cohn agrees to defend them in court and Trump witnesses the lawyer's agressive methods ...

The Apprentice is a biographical drama film directed by Ali Abbasi, based on the early business career of Donald J. Trump.

Abbasi's film, while taking the usual creative liberties common with biographical dramas, quite faithfully follows the early career of Trump through the 1970s and 1980s, when he was mentored by Cohn. Because of its subject matter and Trump's legal team trying to block it from being released, the film had trouble finding an American distributor.

If you've asked yourself how Donald Trump became the man he is, this is your movie, and it's also not as one-sided as you might think, and not an attempt at political assassination.

Apart from the terrible hair, which was always the same, the young man at the beginning of the film isn't yet the infamous man we all know, but we will see Trump slowly grow into a narcissistic, ruthless businessman, all under Cohn's tutelage and formed by the landscape of the 1970s and 1980s.

Sebastian Stan is revelation here. His name certainly doesn't come to mind first when you want to cast the role, but he evolves over the course of the film, slipping into Trump's skin, taking on his mannerisms one by one instead of putting on another Trump impression.

Also great is Jeremy Strong, and the movie has an excellent supporting cast, which includes Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump.

The filming style - deliberately made to look like a documentary, which I'm not a fan of - makes it oftentimes indeed feel as if all was filmed with a documentary film team. While I would've preferred a different approach, and it's tedious at times, they made it work.

In conclusion, The Apprentice shines a light on of the most prominent figureheads of 1980s corporate greed, as well the roots of an infamous public figure, which features outstanding performances by Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong.

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