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| Directed by Jodie Foster Written by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore and Jim Koufe |
Alo Party Peoples.
We're in one of those periods where there's this huge juggernaut that everyone knows is just going to crush the box office and destroy anything in its path, so everyone else gets out of the way and lets the juggernaut run its course. So, here's a review of the only notable thing that anyone bothered to release this week.
Money Monster is a feature length adaptation of that Facebook meme about Wall Street shared by your nephew that won't shut up about Bernie Sanders, it's got passion behind it, it has an idea that it scratches at, and you might even find yourself agreeing with it, but it's not willing to engage that idea on anything more than a surface level and it's too self satisfied to take seriously.
George Clooney is Lee Gates, host of "Money Monster", which tries to be a thinly veiled facsimile of Mad Money, but with how Clooney acts, introducing the show with choreographed background dancers, it comes across more like a half-rent knockoff of The Daily Show parodying Mad Money (if anyone ever tries to film "The Jon Stewart Story", they should cast Clooney). When a stock that Lee said was a safe investment crashes due to a computer glitch, Jack O'Donnel as a deranged viewer that had invested all his savings into that stock breaks into the set and holds him and the production team hostage while the show is being broadcast. He forces Clooney to wear a suicide vest and demands that the host renounce the lies he's been spewing lest he take his thumb off of the detonator, all while law enforcement is trying to get into the building and Julia Roberts as the show's director desperately tries to get in contact the company's CEO, who just so happened to be on a transatlantic flight when the stock went bust.
Director Jodie Foster knows how to build tension, it helps that the first two thirds of the film confine the action more-or-less entirely to the studio, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere that lends itself to something passing for realism, but when the third act rolls around, for no real reason, they decide to move the broadcast out into the streets, deflating the tension at the moment where it should be building to a climax. The actors are similarly hit and miss, Clooney's natural charisma is a perfect fit for the TV host, and he has good chemistry with Julia Roberts, but Jack O'Connel's crazed fan is just all over the place, sometimes he's believably deranged, other times his exaggerated Brooklyn accent detracts from the tension at the worst possible moment, like when the police and the studio get his pregnant girlfriend on air to talk him down, and instead she snaps at him, making the situation worse. This should be a tense moment, we should care, but we can't because of the caricature onscreen.
That's the problem with the entire film, the screenplay is a caricature of it's own worldview and message, and whenever Money Monster approaches having a point, it gets watered down in the half-formed philosophizing of a fourteen year old that just discovered that the world isn't perfect, and decided that this must mean that everything is the worst. If The Big Short is what a Michael Moore film would be if he knew how to talk to an audience instead of talking at them, then Money Monster is what would happen if he were to drop the pretense of documentary and outright film his manifesto, it's definitely trying, but it just doesn't work, and by the end it's just kind of insufferable. The cast puts in an admirable effort, the cinematographer and the editor know what they're doing, but the screenplay and the direction are plagued by a constant inability to maintain a consistent tone, swinging between a dark comedy and a claustrophobic thriller. The result feels like either a below average episode of Black Mirror or an average episode of CSI depending on how heavily it beats you over the head with it's half-hearted moralizing.
Have a nice day,
Greg.B
FINAL RATING: 2/5
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