Laundromat, The

Particularly given Steven Soderbergh’s periodic threats to retire from film-making you’ve really have got to wonder who thought this film needed making. Based on a real life 2016 financial world scandal dubbed The Panama Papers which involved a WikiLeaks-like “data dump” of information about a host of more or less dodgy high-wealth individuals using offshore shell companies to evade tax, launder cash and avoid their social and legal obligations.

Since the 2008 global financial crisis there have been many dramatically compelling movies about the staggering amount of institutionalized malfeasance that there is in the world of high finance such as Margin Call (2011) and The Big Short (2015).

If Soderbergh’s film which was scripted by his regular collaborator Scott Z Burns based on the 2017 book 'Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers' by the Pulitzer-winning journalist Jake Bernstein had been of this ilk it would have been worth watching. Instead it is less a dramatization than a handful of slickly-turned but random vignettes hosted by the two dirty, rotten scoundrels who for a while at least were prime facilitators of the rich getting rich and the devil taking the hindmost, Jürgen Mossack (Gary Oldman) and Ramon Fonseca (Antonio Banderas).

Other than these two nattily-attired peripatetic guides who shepherd us through the global maze of legal deceit that is the off-shore world and an intermittently-appearing Meryl Streep whose story kicks off proceedings there is nothing connecting the various tales other than the fact they all are built on sand. These vignettes are so well-crafted, however, that it’s not until the film’s cute legerdemain ending that we realize that this is so.

The film’s ending suggests that the Burns and Soderbergh care deeply about the film’s message even acknowledging their own complicity but the device of having Mossack and Fonseca flippantly addressing the camera sets the wrong tone, resulting in a viewer disengagement which is compounded by the stylistically uneven episodic structure and thusly turning real social injustice into a forgettable diversion.

 

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