A movie I wanted to like more than I did. The other films I reviewed today were a useless sequel (“Neighbors 2”) that strives to make a faux-statement about sororities having a right to party and a film that is deliberately light and throwaway (“The Nice Guys”) but successful at it. So it feels wrong to penalize “Money Monster,” a movie that clearly has something it wants to say, but no real idea how to say it. To call this film a missed opportunity is putting it lightly.
What Works: Not much, and all you can really say is that Julia Roberts remains a compelling actress (who hasn’t lately had a role that gives her much to do) and George Clooney does what he can. Sure, I could see where the idea of having a working class gunman take a financial show hot shot hostage on the air, and hold him accountable for his stock picks would be a juicy one, but this sure isn’t the best telling of that idea…
What Doesn’t: Jack O’Connell—the British actor struggling to pull off a New Yawk accent or American blue collar worker vibe—is horribly miscast as said unstable schmoe/working class vigilante. But the biggest problem is a script that is willfully ignorant of common sense as we see scenes that fly in the face of reason, like a strange man being allowed to stroll onto a live television set or the climax in which Wall Street is effectively shut down by a marching threat parade. [Fun fact: each big investment bank has lots of armed guards and paramilitary-like weapons outside it. A media circus frog marching a bomb into a bank for a dramatic “People’s Court” moment would likelier happen on Pluto.]
What I Would Have Done Differently: “Money Monster” ‘s villain actually makes a compelling case for himself at the end of the movie, and that’s both an interesting twist, but also kind-of drives home the fact that this film is pointless. It’s not even an effective diatribe against high frequency trading—the artificially intelligent trading software or machines that could “glitch” and crash the economy—as soon “Money Monster” shifts its focus towards more human villains. Plus, the film’s final scene is beyond hokey and actually seems to make the case that not even the characters in the movie will remember much of what we’ve just seen. I would have made high frequency traders the movie’s target. Or kept the action confined to the TV studio where Clooney’s financial snake-oil salesman has to account for his part, and maybe make it more “12 Angry Men” style where capitalism/the-elite/the one-percent are on trial, but let Clooney defend himself as eloquently as the film’s hedge fund villain does, rather than spend 3/4ths of the movie having Clooney deflect to the hedge fund king and have characters asking “where is he?” Spoiler alert: the answer to the “where is he?” question is never going to be satisfying if a movie takes most of its length to get there.