Foster’s film is no solid investment
|||MONEY MONSTER
DIRECTOR: Jodie Foster
CAST: George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jack O’Connell
CLASSIFICATION: 16 L
RUNNING TIME: 99 minutes
RATING: 3 stars (out of 5)
Ann Hornaday
George Clooney mugs, dances and pretty much looks like he’s having the time of his life in Money Monster, in which he plays a showboating financial cable show host. With his on-air gimmicks, quippy catchphrases and a showgirl on each arm, Clooney’s Lee Gates is a cocky, self-impressed avatar of post-2008 arrogance and self-regard, a one-man booster for Wall Street players who treat him like a peer (“I haven’t eaten dinner alone since the ’90s,” he boasts at one point), but secretly see him as a useful idiot.
Gates’s dawning awareness that he’s been a pawn in a rigged game is one of the most interesting undercurrents of Money Monster, in which the fun and games come to an abrupt end when a disgruntled investor – a young working stiff named Kyle, (O’Connell) – invades Gates’s set with a gun and forces him to put on a vest outfitted with a bomb. Kyle wants to know where his money went.
Transpiring virtually in real time, Money Monster chronicles the efforts of Gates – and his director (Roberts) – to placate Kyle, find the answers to his questions and keep everyone, plebes and plutocrats alike, from going kablooey.
Efficiently directed by Foster, Money Monster gets off to a promising start, not only with Clooney’s amusing high jinks as a shallow roue, but also thanks to his easy, bantering relationship with Roberts, whose constant voice in his ear recalls Emily Mortimer and Jeff Daniels’s dynamic in the HBO series Newsroom — all the more impressive for the fact that Clooney and Roberts filmed their scenes separately, according to Foster. The film has a taut, nervous energy that infuses what is essentially a chamber piece with three people into a substantive, of-the-moment thriller.
Propelled by the same populist rage as films like last year’s The Big Short and this year’s most talked-about political campaigns, Money Monster is nothing if not timely, which makes it all the more disappointing when the plot takes increasingly outlandish, even naive turns, and what could have been a modern classic on a par with Dog Day Afternoon or Network instead becomes Speed with more high-frequency trading and arcane algorithms.
Actually, the film most closely resembles Mad City, a misbegotten parable about media and violence that came out 20 years ago and was almost immediately forgotten. In that case, too, the film’s relevance was made moot by overworked and unbelievable plotting.
Money Monster, which is at its best when it’s at its most crisply realistic and timely, suffers from the kind of only-in-Hollywood plot twists and eye-rolling exaggeration that result in smarter than average pulp, but pulp nonetheless.
Still, for most of its swift running time, Money Monster is entertaining, especially when Gates hits on the idea of persuading his fans to invest in the errant stock in order to bring Kyle back into the black: his speech to viewers, in which he calls upon them to behave like humans and not computers, is delivered with every ounce of the sincerity Clooney’s character in Hail, Caesar! brought to his climactic oration at Christ’s crucifixion. With all its talk of glitches, blips and black swans, Money Monster is a bit of a black swan itself: not quite the sophisticated drama the era deserves, but not the usual adrenalin-addled genre exercise, either. – The Washington Post
If you liked John Q or Mad City, you’ll like this.