Movie Review: 'Money Monster'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- In Money Monster, money is just one of the monsters.
The others are human.
George Clooney stars in this contemporary suspense thriller as Lee Gates, a showboating television personality and financial guru (who seems, even if cast and crew deny it, inspired by CNBC's Jim Cramer of Mad Money) dishing out stock tips on a financial-network show produced by Patty Fenn, played by co-star Julia Roberts.
All is well until the day that Kyle Budwell, played by (Unbroken's) Jack O'Connell, an angry, armed investor who has lost his family's entire life savings because of a failing fund that was drained by a technical glitch, shows up in the studio in front of a live viewing audience as a suicidal bomber, sporting an explosive device, who takes Kates, Fenn, and the crew hostage.
He's angry at Gates for recommending a "sure thing" high-tech stock that has mysteriously crashed.
And in addition to going after his vanishing money, he wants answers to big-money questions that are, for a change, other than lies. For openers, how could $800-million, Budwell's money included, disappear overnight?
Meanwhile, the details of the off-air lives of these three people are revealed as the world watches.
Eventually, Gates finds himself being paraded through the streets of New York City, a bomb strapped to him, in search of the CEO who lost Budwell's money and ruined his life.
For two-time Oscar-winning actress Jodie Foster (The Accused, The Silence of the Lambs), Money Monster represents her fourth outing in the director's chair (Little Man Tate, Home for the Holidays, The Beaver), certainly a respectable start to her directorial career.
But this time out, she might have benefited from further studying director Sidney Lumet's great suspense thriller, Dog Day Afternoon, a film which this one superficially resembles.
That way, while her film certainly speaks to the many audience members who have been scammed or know of others who have been fleeced, she might have been able to generate more tension along the way.
This kind of thriller should start off with something unlikely and then make it convincingly real as it proceeds. Unfortunately, Money Monster does the opposite, selling its initial premise and then spinning out of control and losing credibility in the late going.
Foster keeps the high-finance plot in the background as she focuses on what the main characters have in common and how modern technology shapes and perhaps exacerbates our problems.
But it's star power that carries the day.
With her two leads, each exuding effortless presence, Foster has collaborated with the right messengers. For Clooney and Roberts, this is their fifth collaboration, having both acted in Ocean's Eleven and Ocean's Twelve, and Clooney having directed Roberts in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and produced August: Osage County, for which she was Oscar-nominated.
The script by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore, and Jim Kouf, based on a story by the latter two screenwriters, certainly taps into our resentment of contemporary economic injustice, and unfolds in approximately real time.
But the screw loosens rather than tightens in Act Three and leaves it squarely up to the headliners to keep us plugged in.
Money Monster hereby joins such films as The Big Short, Wall Street, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Arbitrage in the subgenre of modern movies trying to explain the inscrutable financial arena through entertainment aimed at a mass audience.
But it's not quite up to their standards.
So we'll buy 2-1/2 stars out of 4 for Money Monster, a timely and absorbing but only moderately gripping thriller/star vehicle that pays a modest dividend on your investment of time.
