Review For Trump Biopic ‘The Apprentice’ Compares Ex-President to Frankenstein’s Monster
Screenshot via Apprentice Productions Ontario Inc
Reviews are starting to come in for director Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, the biopic about the origin story of former President Donald Trump that he and his supporters have tried to stop from being released.
One review in Entertainment Weekly published on Sunday compared Trump to Frankenstein’s monster, with the late mob lawyer Roy Cohn as the mad scientist who created him:
As Dr. Frankenstein once learned, the problem with creating a monster is that eventually, you have to confront the horrors you have wrought.
That’s what happened to Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) after mentoring a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan), an American parable of greed and betrayal brought to life with a soap-operatic glee in The Apprentice, which is making its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival ahead of its pre-election Oct. 11 release date.
EW‘s Maureen Lee Lenker describes the symbiotic relationship between the young Trump and Cohn thusly:
As a young man desperate to impress his father, Fred (Martin Donovan), Trump finds an unexpected ally in notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, infamous for sending the Rosenbergs to the electric chair at the height of the Red Scare.
Cohn takes Trump under his corrupted wing, teaching him the three rules by which he lives: 1) Attack, attack, attack; 2) Admit nothing, deny everything; and 3) No matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat. It’s a sickeningly familiar playbook to anyone who’s watched the news in the past decade.
The review itself is a positive one, giving The Apprentice a B+ grade, giving the strongest marks to the actors playing the real-life figures, the Emmy-winning Strong (and his “gift for humanizing the most corrupt and despicable among us”), the Golden Globe- and Emmy-nominated Stan (who “avoids any of the over-the-top late-night parodies of Donald Trump, instead gradually evolving into the more recognizable bloviating, tanned, grotesque figure), and Oscar nominee Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump (“[I]t’s impossible not to relish the strange synchronicity of Bakalova’s portrayal of Ivana and the fact that the actress first rose to prominence for her onscreen encounter with former Trump lawyer, Rudy Giuliani” in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm).
The Apprentice will be released in theaters on October 11.
