There’s no real spoiling “Death of a Unicorn,” an unabashedly nonsensical movie that doesn’t take anything too seriously, itself included. There are misty-eyed parent-child moments, digs at the wealthy, nods at the environment. Mostly, though, the whole thing is a wall-to-wall goof, despite the grandeur of its mystical attraction, whose traditional rangelands have included the King James Bible, illuminated manuscripts, medieval tapestries, fantasy literature, pop culture, children’s playrooms and Ridley Scott films (well, two: “Blade Runner” and “Legend”). Here, it nearly ends up as roadkill on a remote Canadian highway.
The guy behind the wheel, Elliot (Paul Rudd), is busy yammering and trying to placate his demonstrably unhappy daughter, ahem, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), when he hits something big with his rental car, causing it to spin out. Elliot is en route to his boss’s remote family compound to deal with some pressing business that he hopes will insure his and his daughter’s future. They’re clearly loving but also clouded with grief from the death of Ridley’s mother, a tragedy that informs Elliot’s determined careerism and Ridley’s melancholy, both of which flicker on and off throughout the movie, amid jokes and pratfalls, scheming and dealing, firing guns and rampaging monsters, some with two legs and others with four.
What happens next is a high-concept, middlebrow, low-stakes comedy about the haves and the (kind of) have-nots that’s effectively an elevator pitch — be afraid of unicorns, be very afraid — stretched to feature length. The setup is a mush of old standbys (the comedy of rich fools, the horror of other people) spiced up with myth, headline news and cinematic allusions. The writer-director Alex Scharfman has, for one, borrowed visual and thematic ideas from the unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters, the medieval branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he’s clearly watched nerve-shredders like “Alien.” As he’s noted in interviews, he has also drawn inspiration from the Sackler family, the longtime owners of Purdue Pharma.
The story kicks in once the unicorn in question goes splat. Much of what ensues takes place at the boss’s preposterously grandiose lodge — nay, castlelike fortress — tucked in wilderness and protected by armed guards. There, Elliot and Ridley pull up with a small motionless unicorn in the car that soon proves very much alive; high jinks ensue with enough scrambling silliness to suggest that Scharfman is also familiar with Abbott and Costello. To that comic end, Rudd and Ortega soon run amok with the rest of the sterling cast, starting with the peerless Richard E. Grant as Odell Leopold, the paterfamilias whose villainous bona fides are evident the minute you hear that this brood owns a pharmaceutical giant.
With his production team, Scharfman squeezes comedy and mild shivers out of the Leopolds and their cloistered lair. Set against fairy-tale snowcapped peaks, the mansion is a warren of expensive terrible taste, with just enough rooms to serve as a rat maze once things go from weird to chaotically violent, which they do posthaste. Scharfman doesn’t express much visual flair here; he points, he shoots. But he knows how to whet the audience’s bloodlust by stocking a house with pricey goodies (antiques, luxury rides, a grand piano) and putting a one-percent rotter in pleated white shorts and gold-trimmed loafers without socks. (Kudos to the production designer Amy Williams and the costume designer Andrea Flesch.)
As in some other recent class-conscious comedies (“The Menu,” “Triangle of Sadness”), the jabs at the wealthy in “Death of a Unicorn” don’t land hard or at all, partly because the targets are naughty capitalists rather than the system that spawned them. Here, at least, the performers — who include Téa Leoni as Odell’s wife, the very funny Will Poulter as the Leopold son and Anthony Carrigan as a put-upon servant — have the kinds of ductile faces, rubber-band moves and vocal dexterity that can keep even sluggish material moving. Ortega, who’s better than she needs to be here, gives the story just enough heart to invest it with a soupçon of feeling while the rest of the cast goes progressively and exuberantly nuts.
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