Death of a Telemarketer เซลส์(แมน)ดวงซวย (2020) บรรยายไทย

Telemarketers, and their profession as a whole, hinge on a certain brand of dishonesty, as the job demands them to invent creative ways to make potential marks stay on the line. The competition is brutal, the work environment almost always borders on toxic, and the world of high-pressure cold calls is overwhelmingly cutthroat. These realistic aspects of the telemarketing industry are captured well in Khaled Ridgeway’s Death of a Telemarketer, which is otherwise a bland comedy that elicits a few scattered laughs. Stretched beyond its limits, Death of a Telemarketer is never funny enough, and its hostage plot makes as much sense as a nonsensical cold call.

Ace telemarketer Kasey (Lamorne Morris) is unrepentantly ahead of the game, an all-star at Telewin, selling phone and internet connections to unsuspecting customers in any crooked way that garners a sale. An unsympathetic character from the get-go, Kasey is hell-bent on winning Telewin’s close sale content in order to win a hefty commission, which he plans to use to pay off his payday loans. After the other telemarketers are urged (almost threatened) to adopt the Kasey method, newbie employee Barry (Woody McClain) surpasses Kasey considerably. Desperate to make this work, Kasey stays up late and decides to take a stab at the forbidden Do Not Call List.

The ridiculously capitalist model on which the industry thrives is portrayed accurately, as one of the employees is fired on the spot for his inability to lie and swindle, while Kasey is applauded for his fraudulent techniques. Amid all of this, Kasey attempts to win back his girlfriend Christine (Alisha Wainwright) with a romantic dinner but is unable to do so for the unfortunate events that ensue that night. With only 30 minutes to surpass Barry’s record, Kasey attempts to swindle a certain Mr. Asa (Jackie Earle Haley), pretending to be his old friend, only to be told that he died a while ago. Things take an even murkier turn when Asa turns up at Telewin and holds Kasey hostage at gunpoint, demanding that he apologize to everyone on the Do Not Call List on behalf of all telemarketers.

The first half of Death of a Telemarketer is a bit slow and awkward, with the jokes managing to elicit a chuckle here and there. Nothing is meant to be taken too seriously, of course, as it is a comedy at its core. But when the overall tone shifts from comedic to sluggish, it is difficult to care about everything that unravels onscreen. Morris does his best to step into the shoes of Kasey, a telemarketer who is objectively beyond redemption, but only a few of his offhanded jokes and comments land, if at all. The rest of the characters, including those who take Kasey hostage, appear inept but still manage to get the upper hand, and those scenes are devoid of tension or logic of any sort.

Ridgeway obviously meant for the title to mirror Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman to comedic effect, but the intended effect feels more vapid as the film progresses. Much like the protagonist, who remains insincere till the very end, Death of a Telemarketer has an air of duplicity about it, which does not quite work in the film’s favor. For someone dubbed as a smooth-talker, Kasey sure is incapable of grasping base-level emotive beats in a conversation, and this falsity extends to the film as a whole, dragging it down as it progresses. Perhaps if Death of a Telemarketer were 30 minutes shorter, it could’ve made an improvement on its already-threadbare and mirthless plot.