Money Monster – Film Review by Robert Dooley

Director: Jodie Foster
Writers: Jamie Linden (screenplay), Alan DiFiore (screenplay)
Stars: George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jack O’Connell

George Clooney’s Lee Gates makes an error of judgement in trusting the CEO of Ibis Global Capital Stock. He plugs the company on his show Money Monster, stating that investing in Ibis is safer than a savings account. Of course Ibis then loses $80 million in investors money including $60,000 invested by Jack O’Connell’s Kyle Budwell, leading to Kyle taking Gates hostage on live television with a gun and a vest filled with semtex. The biggest error in judgement however is reserved for the cast, somehow letting Jodie Foster convince them to sign on to this lacklustre hostage thriller.

I use the word thriller as lightly as possible. There is absolutely no tension in this film. There’s no build up. The film starts. We see vignettes from Gates’ show. There is an incredibly out of place erectile cream joke. Gates is taken hostage. The plot that everyone worked out twenty minutes in unveils itself. And it ends with the characters having learned nothing. With the plot and character arcs being so formulaic you don’t worry for the characters, and when you don’t worry there’s no room for tension to build. A huge amount of tension can be built using the score alone, Sicario for example, but it’s as if someone produced the score using stock music from a tiny keyboard.

Jack O’Connell tries in his everyman blue collar role but he doesn’t have a lot to work with in terms of script. There’s also a limit for sympathy we can afford to someone who placed their full life savings on a tip a dancing George Clooney gave the whole world. Clooney himself is on autopilot for the duration of the film as a stereotypical man child and I would gladly give my own life savings to never see the aforementioned dancing again as long as I live. For the stereotypical man child, we have the stereotypical work mother in the show’s director Patty Fenn played by Julia Roberts who in addition to being an underwritten cliché of a character doesn’t even bother to look shocked when a man shows up firing a gun in the studio.

It’s not even just that this is a bad film, it’s the kind of film that thinks it’s clever and morally complex when really it’s not. The Big Short has shown that you can make a film about economics that is complex but accessible, it took complicated economic systems and showed us what was wrong with the system. It’s as if Foster and her team have never even heard of that film because they don’t get bogged down in the corruption of the system, the cause of their crash is confined to one man and one company. Theirs is a dumbed down economics for a dumbed down film to a presumed dumb audience.

Money Monster has a message in there, but it doesn’t quite seem to know how to get it across. It lacks the conviction to really hammer home its meaning, whimpering to a finish with the characters right back where they started unchanged from the events. This is a bad film, but still not quite as bad as that dancing.