Kevin O’Leary has a big problem with the ending of Marty Supreme

This article enters a few spoilers for “Marty Supreme”.

In Josh Safdie’s new film, “Marty Supreme,” irascible hustler and serial bad decision-maker Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) plans to travel overseas to represent the United States in a series of high-profile table tennis tournaments. Throughout the film, Marty falls in and out of the good graces of a potential benefactor, a man named Milton Rockwell (Shark Tank co-host Kevin “Mr. Wonderful” O’Leary), the very, very wealthy husband of an American movie star named Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Early in the film, Milton offers Marty a sweetheart deal to play an exhibition match in Japan against a player he had already lost to…and lose again for theatrical reasons. Marty’s huge ego can’t stand the idea of ​​losing an exhibition match, and he refuses. However, by the end of the film’s extended runtime, Marty has made so many terrible decisions and lost so much money that he decides to return to Rockwell and grovel/accept. Milton takes every opportunity to humiliate Marty, which might please the audience; Marty is a corpse who hurts people and gets people killed with his incessant pushing and shoving.

In fact, Marty was such a scoundrel that O’Leary didn’t like the ending of “Marty Supreme.” We’ll go into spoiler detail below, but O’Leary felt that Marty escaped at the end of the filmwhen he should have faced harsher consequences for his sins. O’Leary said this in a recent interview with Variety. One of Marty’s many sins was ignoring and mistreating his girlfriend Rachel (Odessa A’Zion), whom he impregnated. The fact that he could have a tearful reunion with her at the end rubbed O’Leary the wrong way.

O’Leary rightly pointed out that Marty betrayed everyone in “Marty Supreme”, including Milton. The idea was that Milton would pay Marty a handful of money for throwing the exhibition match, then kiss a pig on camera. According to Milton, humiliating the visiting American player would go down well with Japanese viewers. Plus, everyone could sense that Marty was arrogant anyway, so seeing his ego destroyed would have been cathartic. But Marty then demands a rematch, which disrupts Milton’s plans. Milton points out that Marty’s money would be withheld, but Marty doesn’t care. This time he wants dignity.

And then, by gaining his dignity, Marty gets a sweet catharsis where he can run home, be with Rachel, and hold his baby. This, O’Leary believed, was absurd. Obviously, he argued with the film’s writers on this point, hoping that it would change. In fact, O’Leary had a darker idea for an ending, saying:

“I told them I was really unhappy with the ending, that my character was screwed up like that. This kumbaya ending is absurd. […] [Marty] I fucked everyone. […] Why shouldn’t he live a life of misery in perpetuity after that? […] Rachel must die. She must die in childbirth. »

Maybe Marty deserved a miserable end for a life poorly lived. All that hard work and sins are always punished.

There is also another surreal moment to the end of “Marty Supreme” in which Milton confronts Marty about his renegade nature. Milton, seeing that Marty is about to cost him a lot of money, pulls him aside to threaten him. Milton announces that he shouldn’t be angry, because he is actually a centuries-old vampire who intends to bite Marty and drink his blood. Marty – and the audience – are a little taken aback by this announcement, because it’s a very strange way to threaten someone. If he really were a vampire, it would be even stranger, because there was no supernatural element in “Marty Supreme”. The full speech unfolds:

“Let me explain. I was born in 1601. I’m a vampire. I’ve been around forever. I’ve met many Marty Mausers over the centuries. Some of them crossed paths with me, some of them weren’t straight. They weren’t honest. And those are the ones that are still here. If you go out and win this game, you’ll be here forever too. And you’ll never be happy. You’ll never be happy.”

O’Leary would have preferred the storyline if it had turned out that his character was actually a vampire and had bitten Marty. Indeed, this idea was brought up during production, and O’Leary said the filmmakers “went as far as making digital teeth.” And oddly enough, O’Leary is right. A non-Jewish businessman sucking the blood of a Jewish conman would have not only punished Marty, but also added to the film’s themes of exploitation and Jewish identity. “I know it sounds crazy,” O’Leary added, “but to me it would be the right punishment.”