Howard Ratner is an asshole. He’s an asshole to his wife, Dinah (Idina Menzel). He’s an asshole to his girlfriend, Julia (Julia Fox). He’s an asshole to his kids (who he, and we, hardly ever see). He’s an asshole to his employees, including Demany (Lakeith Stanfield), as he sells diamond-encrusted baubles out of a cramped showroom in Manhattan’s diamond district. He’s an asshole to regular people, like receptionists and bouncers, and he’s an asshole to famous people, like Kevin Garnett (Kevin Garnett) and The Weeknd (The Weeknd). And he’s especially an asshole to anyone he owes money to—which is a lot of people, chief among them being Arno (Eric Bogosian). And since Arno is also related to Howard, he really gets treated like shit.
It’s not a coincidence that the first images we see of Howard are obtained via a colonoscopy, but even when the camera slides out of Howard’s posterior to his exterior—he’s played, and played remarkably, by the version of Adam Sandler who is an amazing actor in good movies—there’s still something that feels shitty about the guy. Howard never stops wheeling and dealing, and in the hours we spend with him, he says maybe two or three things that are true. The rest of the time, he says whatever gets him what he needs: to get paid, to get laid, to get let out of the trunk of his car, where Arno’s thugs have locked him after smacking him around and stripping him down.