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LAST month, Christopher Plummer almost saved a very bland Charles Dickens biopic with a few brief but very lively scenes as Scrooge.
Now the veteran has gone one better by playing the world-famous miser, the oil magnate JP Getty.
Six weeks before the true story about the 1973 kidnapping of the billionaire’s imaginatively named grandson John Paul Getty III was due out, a string of lurid stories surfaced about the alleged sexual misdeeds of Kevin Spacey, the actor playing him.
Director Ridley Scott, 80, approached the studio with an astonishing plan. For an estimated $10million he could reshoot Spacey’s scenes in nine days with 88-yearold Christopher Plummer taking over the role.
We’ll never know how Spacey would have been, but the old man make-up he sported in the early trailer did bring to mind the early 2000s sketch show Bo Selecta!
Psychopath
It was an expensive gamble but it has paid off handsomely. Plummer is the best thing in the film.
In this tense, tightly-plotted thriller, Getty, not just the richest man in the world but “the richest man in the history of the world”, is a borderline psychopath with an almost certifiable obsession with penny-pinching.
When his favourite grandson “Paul”(Charlie Plummer, no relation) is kidnapped in Italy he tells visiting reporters precisely how much ransom he is willing to pay. “Nothing,” he says with the faintest hint of a smirk. The boy’s mother has a different view. Abigail Getty (Michelle Williams) knows about his hard-bargaining from her divorce from his drug-addled son. She may have left the marriage without a penny, but as she still had custody of her children she considers it a victory.
To Getty, the kidnapping is an opportunity to renegotiate terms.
Williams’s Abigail is the perfect foil to Plummer’s ice-cold billionaire. Mark Wahlberg feels less well cast as Getty’s troubleshooter Fletcher Chase, an ex-CIA agent tasked with closing his boss’ trickiest deals. His laid-back Boston charm de-fangs the sharply-dressed shark a little too early.
But Scott manages to keep the suspense, switching between the tense negotiations in England and southern Italy, where Paul is being held by a petty thieves and hard-bitten mafia.
The octogenarians have cracked it.
All The Money In The World is worth every penny. SADDLE UP: Bale & Pike (1) (2) JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE (-) (3) (5) (4) (6) (7) (10) (-) (1) (2) JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE (3) (4) (5) (6) (-) (8) (7) (9) £7.9m £5.2m £4.7m £2.3m £1.8m £1.3m £492k £265k £160k £82.0k $52.5m $50.0m $16.8m $15.5m $11.3m $7.4m $5.5m $5.4m $4.7m $3.8m