"The film business is in its final innings," someone of no consequence says in Swimming with Sharks, an unnecessary serialised remake of a 1994 movie starring Kevin Spacey back before he was Voldemort.
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He may be right. We may be witnessing the death throes of the movie biz; we may be watching its lifeforce be absorbed by its monstrous conjoined twin, the streaming industry, and if this awful show on Amazon Prime is any indication of how Hollywood is being reformed by the caprices of Gen-Subscriber, all is lost.
The original Swimming with Sharks had Spacey at his caustic best. He played a movie mogul called Buddy Ackerman who treats his new assistant so terribly, the young writer is forced to exact revenge resulting in the kind of unexpected consequences audiences of 30 years ago could ponder appreciatively as they stood before a clunky, temperamental appliance and rewound a leased cartridge of magnetic tape before physically returning the cumbersome slab of plastic to a bricks-and-mortar Video Ezy outlet down at the arcade before 6pm lest they incur a four-dollar fine, which, of course, they would pay dutifully and with much chagrin should they be tardy and lessen the chances of another worthy community member having the opportunity to repeat this anachronistic ritual for themselves in their own carpeted homes.
The cautionary tale of being careful who you step on as you make your way to the top was around almost a decade before the novel, The Devil Wears Prada, was published and turned into one of the films of the noughties that would unleash Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt on us all.
Without, it would seem, a hint of irony, the creators of the new Swimming with Sharks have committed the predictable big-studio crime of taking source material and stuffing it with so many added extras and updates, not only does the end product no longer resemble its antecedent, its whole reason for being was the first thing jettisoned in the refit.
This modernised take on Tinseltown amounts to a lot less double-breasted power suits, changing the gender of the two leads and sexualising virtually every scene.
Each episode slips by like an unpleasant, yet not particularly challenging, bowel movement. We are bludgeoned about the head by a bullying musical score and assailed by third-rate dialogue ("It's my sperm! Mine!").
The cast simply fades away, echoes and soundbites and shadows of characters we've seen before.
Diane Kruger shatters into a million, imperceptible pieces as she wrestles with her multi-faceted ice queen studio head who really just wants to be a stay-at-home mum.
As played by Kiernan Shipka, Kruger's hayseed intern straight off bus from Colorado Springs, may in fact be a CGI amalgam of all those insinuated female psychos we've been watching ever since Glenn Close so sublimely put that bunny on the boil back in 1987.
Only Donald Sutherland seems to have sniffed what's being dished out here and decides to phone in his dying movie mogul with liberal doses of smarm and coquettish vulnerability. He is greasy and reptilian and ridiculous and all-round disgusting and pretty much the only respite we have across this entire misguided dirge decrying the moral vacuum of the world's most famous industry town.
So many other projects - Mulholland Drive, Neon Demon, Brand New Cherry Flavor - have navigated the same waters Swimming with Sharks now occupies, only their creators did it knowing to pass comment on the dark heart of Los Angeles, they must be wary of its very real dangers yet not allow its brooding mass to overwhelm the process.
From tail to snout, Swimming with Sharks gets it wrong. It is not so bad it's good, it's just bad; it's not a guilty pleasure, it's just guilty.
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There is nothing so disappointing for tragics of the Hollywood-does-Hollywood genre when someone mucks it up (how could you show your face at yoga?). There are so many fascinating components to draw from, it seems almost impossible to misfire.
Hollywood golden boy Tom Hanks is clearly a fan of the genre, too. He announced this week he's written a novel about the industry called The Making of Another Motion Picture Masterpiece.
The two-time Oscar winner doesn't need to prove anything to anyone, and his literary ambitions clearly weren't clipped by Observer critic Alex Preston, who couched the actor-writer's 2017 book of short stories Uncommon Type as "touched by the special banality of mere competence".
The makers of Swimming with Sharks should be so lucky.
