Money Monster

Synopsis: Cable TV stock-market program host Lee Gates (George Clooney) is held hostage during a live broadcast by a man, Kyle Budwell (Jack O'Connell), who lost his life's savings due to Gates' financial advice.

Director Jodie Foster’s heart may well be in the right place in this thriller with an anti-Mammon agenda that no doubt helped to get George Clooney and Julia Roberts on board, but unfortunately her film is so Teflon slick that nothing about it sticks to the frying pan of the real world. Not good when you’re wanting to plead the cause of the little man and decry the blandishments of Wall Street.

At its heart, the core idea of the film, that of an ordinary Joe who has lost his life savings in the stockmarket and who wants to hold The System accountable has a Capraesque pathos that could really have packed a punch. Unfortunately the script by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore and Jim Kouf packages it as a conventional thriller and Foster, whose last film, The Beaver (2011), was not likely to have prepared her for the thriller genre, has no idea how to stage it convincingly or pace it effectively. Instead she moves the story at a breakneck speed through narrative contrivances that could only happen in a (not very good) scriptwriter’s imagination tickled up by simplistic graphics and pseudo-authentic jargon-speak (as well as rolling out clichés like "do the maths" and "you've done good"). The upshot is, to paraphrase one of those graphics, Hollywood 1, Reality 0.

Most grievously the film’s characters are walk-ons from many other films and the individual performances do nothing to lift them beyond the ho-hum. Roberts does her usual wryly sharp-tongued thing as Gates’s tired-of-it-all producer, Patty, and Clooney is yet again a charming rogue. That both of their cynical characters become committed advocates of Kyle’s cause is just another of those Teflon conveniences that dog the film from its get-go. Dominic West is a text-book villain and new face Caitriona Balfe plays his sexy CCO, another corporate character who develops an improbable heart-of-gold. Only Jack O'Connell is not doing familiar but as he has little in the way of characterization to work with, this doesn’t add much to the outcome.

Money Monster wraps with a life-goes-on, today’s-news-bite-is-tomorrow’s-Youtube-clip, Patty-and-Lee-become-buddies-and-maybe-more ending.  It is an ill-judged way to resolve what should have been played as a modern tragedy. It’s as if Foster is saying that Kyle’s feeble tilt at justice didn’t matter after all. Sadly, whatever good intentions she might have had, neither does her film.

Want more about this film?

Want something different?