The rich, they are not like you and I — they see the world through the jaundiced lens of extreme privilege, they view everything from retail luxury items to relationships as disposable (and easily replaceable), they think nothing of hunting mythical beasts for sport and/or the key to immortality. Death of a Unicorn starts from the position of wanting to roast the rancidest members of the already rotten one-percent on a spit, and if there was ever a time to embrace a class-conscious horror-comedy involving giggles, rage, and gore, it’s right now. You want to put America’s upper crust on blast? Bring it!

To hit a target, however, you need something close to a good aim, and this mix of satire and splatter can’t seem to stop flailing long enough to steady its hand. Tweaking the age-old mythology of a creature that’s graced biblical passages, Renaissance paintings and many a tween’s backpack, filmmaker Alex Scharfman’s debut does manage to rebrand the unicorn as something other than kid-friendly. If you’ve ever fantasized about seeing not just the death of a unicorn but also multiple deaths by unicorn, this movie will make your dreams come true. Strip away the cut-rate VFX, the fake guts and even faker sense of indignation about what the wealthy get away with, however, and you’re left with the equivalent of a meek sheep in wolf’s clothing. It has homicidal fantasy critters, lots of sharp and pointy horns, and absolutely no teeth.

Elliott (Paul Rudd), a recently widowed lawyer, loves his teenage daughter, Ridley (Jenna Ortega). Not as much as his job or the opportunities for advancement presented when you work for a corporate oligarch, mind you; his area of expertise is technically business ethics, which is itself an oxy-moron, but his real specialty is kissing ass. Ridley does not want to be riding shotgun on her dad’s work trip. Their destination is the estate of Elliott’s terminally ill employer, Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant). Also present: Odell’s “better” half, Belinda (Tea Leoni), who appears to view her life as an ongoing audition to join the Real Housewives franchise; and their toxic, entitled fuck-up of a son, Shepard (Will Poulter). Given that they made their fortune in pharmaceuticals, the Leopolds seem to be modeled after the Sacklers, who Scharfman has namechecked as an influence, but they might be any old-money American dynasty from the Astors to the Rockefellers. The point is, they are the kind of filthy rich that requires a mansion full of both servants and paramilitary security guards, and pays for a permanent lack of accountability.

While driving on the long and winding road to get to chez Leopold, Elliott and Ridley hit what they think is a deer. Upon closer inspection, they realize it’s a real-life, honest-to-gosh unicorn. Ridley grabs the animal’s glowing horn — not a euphemism, for the record — and suddenly, she sees the entire cosmos enfold before her eyes, in all of its nebulous and divine glory. Then Elliott bashes the bleating thing’s brains in. It’s a mercy killing, he reasons. There was purple blood pouring out of it by the gallon. Both of them haul the roadkill into the back of their rental car and head to the Leopolds’ house, figuring they will bury the body later.

Long story short, the unicorn’s not quite dead yet. And when Ridley happens to get some of its purple plasma on her fingers then happens to brush her cheek, her skin immediately clears up. As for the Leopolds, they immediately sense that the creature’s healing powers might cure Odell’s ills. Even better, this beast’s mystical properties can be monetized and exploited. Their in-house scientists (played by Steve Park and Sunita Mani) reluctantly begin to study how this once imaginary beast might possibly benefit humanity, and more specifically, the family’s bottom line. Then two much larger unicorns show up outside the place. They are the highly protective parents of the one that’s being poked and prodded in the estate’s lab. Mom and Pops Unicorn are willing to do whatever it takes to reclaim their offspring, which doesn’t bode well for any humans who’d prefer not to be skewered, stomped, and/or disemboweled.

Sunita Mani in ‘Death of a Unicorn.’ Balazs Goldi/A24

You can point to any number of movies over the past several years that have taken the billionaire class to task, or that underline the fact that a wealthy clan’s collective moral compass tends to crack past a certain tax bracket. (This isn’t even the first cursed, aristocratic patriarch Richard E. Grant has played in this decade!) The level of cartoonish selfishness and narcissism these late-capitalistic nightmares are granted here, however, starts to tip into a level that pitches everything into omnishambles territory. Cleverness and cutting commentary are not on the proverbial menu here. Which is just as well, we guess, considering that the entire idea of attacking the profit-over-people mentality is merely a set-up for what Death of a Unicorn really wants to be, which is a riff on Jurassic Park. Except once the film toggles full-time into monster-movie mode, you really began to see how sloppy and poorly executed the thrills and chills are as well. What are we doing here?

Only Ortega seems to get out of this car wreck of a genre flick unscathed — though props to Barry‘s Anthony Carrigan, playing a butler whose deadpan responses to a million ridiculous requests is one of the film’s few saving graces — and you wish more of the cast had been able to sync up with what she’s doing here. The Wednesday star has to stand in for a generation that’s inherited a world titled toward catastrophe, ransacked of its resources by those who bankroll policy, and is governed by either blinkered fat-cats or complicit underlings fighting over crumbs. Her concern over both the animals and the big picture, not to mention her frustration and anger over what legacies of long-grift greed have wrought, offers the tiniest beacon of feeling in a film preoccupied with teeing up some frankly unimpressive carnage. Actors like her who can somehow find purchase in pulpy disasters like this are certainly wish-list fodder for moviemakers, yet are near-impossible to find. We believe there’s even an industry term for folks like her. It begins with a “U.”