Abbasi and the entire promotional campaign have been trying to play both sides, insisting The Apprentice has no political agenda. (Stan’s best performance yet may be on the press circuit, where he claims the film attempts to be apolitical.)
— Brian Eggert (Deep Focus Review)
So which star does The Donald think is the only one worthy of wearing his trademark hair?“Well, ideally, Cary Grant reincarnated,” Trump said. “He’s the ultimate.”
— Austin Smith (New York Post, 2005)
Like a superhero origin story, it chronicles Trump’s awkward early years, with Sebastian Stan beginning the film as an empty vessel and slowly accumulating all the now-familiar tics and mannerisms, like Batman collecting his gadgets. [And] unlike The Wolf of Wall Street, there’s no push-pull sense of attraction/repulsion to Trump’s tacky, amoral empire. It tells the story of a bad man who becomes a worse one, which makes it a little bit unsatisfying.
Synopsis: A young Donald Trump, eager to make his name as a hungry scion of a wealthy family in 1970s New York, comes under the spell of Roy Cohn, the cutthroat attorney who would help create the Donald Trump we know today. Cohn sees in Trump the perfect protégé—someone with raw ambition, a hunger for success, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to win.