The newly released The Apprentice is a 2024 biographical drama centring around the life of ex-US President Donald Trump through the 1970s and 80s. While Donald Trump has referred to the film as a “cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job”, the question remains: will it have an impact on the upcoming US Presidential Election?
In Trump’s eyes, the answer is clearly yes. He claims it was: “put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election, to try and hurt the greatest political movement in the history of our country”. Box office statistics, however, may prove otherwise. Since its US release on the 11th of October Box Office Mojo shows that the film has only made $5.47 million worldwide with just $3.41 million coming from the domestic box office (U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico). According to Collider, the reported production budget is $16 million, meaning that despite the good reviews (81 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 7.2 out of 10 on IMDb) the film is struggling to get people through cinema doors and to make back its relatively small budget.
The main reason for this struggle is that, according to Adrian Horton at The Guardian, most people within more liberal (Democrat) social groups question its value and existence, while the more conservative (Republican) social groups simply dismissed the film for similar reasons to Trump himself. Seemingly, there isn’t a target audience within the US that might actually be interested in watching The Apprentice.
Before watching the film I, like many liberal audience members, found myself questioning why The Apprentice exists. I was asking if it would spend all of its time either attacking the former president or trying to humanise him too much.
After my screening, I was impressed with the direction that director Ali Abbasi and writer Gabriel Sherman took this story in. Instead of falling too far on either side of attacking or humanising Trump, it treads a fine line between the two.
The Apprentice acts as a Frankenstein-like tale that ends without any of the empathy that audiences had for the monster in that story. Trump plays around with people like a child with their toys, throwing them to the curb when he becomes bored or he has no more use for them. Trump is also shown to treat every aspect of his life as a business interaction; one particularly humorous scene, shows him treating his first marriage to Ivana Trump as a business deal, with multiple elements of negotiation.
Sebastian Stan does an excellent job of portraying the monster of this story. He never tries for a full parody, opting instead to use his own voice (seemingly in an effort to add a level of disconnect between his and the real version of Trump) while also managing to capture all of Trump’s signature mannerisms, from hand gestures to the way he shapes his mouth when speaking.
The Apprentice is the best case scenario for a film about Donald Trump released just weeks before the election. While Trump himself may claim the film to be “defamatory”, the audiences that went to see the film certainly won’t think any differently of him as the credits roll.While the film isn’t kind to Trump, it doesn’t portray him in a different light to which the world sees him already
