Hard not to be grabbed by this wish-fulfilment thriller
Money Monster 15 Cert, 99 min Dir Jodie Foster Starring George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jack O’Connell, Caitriona Balfe, Dominic West
If The Big Short and Margin Call left you no wiser about the murky complexities of the financial crisis,
Money Monster is for you. The new film directed by Jodie Foster, which screened out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday, is a raucous hostage thriller that eschews explanation for wish-fulfilment: it allows a beaten-down schmuck to literally hold a gun to the head of a banker who wiped out his savings.
Foster’s film is a critique of the shallowness of much modern financial journalism and the slipperiness of the traders it fails to hold to account that is itself proudly shallow and slippery – less a recession-era Network than
Speed in a TV studio. George Clooney stars as Lee Gates, the smarm-dunked host of a daily financial newscast whose gangsta-ofthe-Nasdaq, get-rich-quick schtick panders to his audience’s crassest instincts. So when a disgruntled viewer, Kyle Budwell (Jack O’Connell), invades the studio with a handgun and a bomb vest, demanding answers about a $60,000 venture that vanished overnight, it makes a grim kind of sense that the show’s director Patty Fenn (Julia Roberts) orders the cameras to keep rolling.
Except Patty isn’t spurred on by scandal. She’s recently handed in her notice for a more respectable, less glamourous job elsewhere, but quickly twigs that a gun to the head might be exactly what TV news needs. With her host’s life in the balance, a live investigation into what happened to poor Kyle’s money can begin.
It’s immediately clear that Kyle is a sap and a hothead, but also a patsy. As recommended by Lee, the investment should have been sound, and it’s the system itself, that’s ultimately to blame. Enter screen right, from the steps of a Learjet, Dominic West’s iron-grinned hedge fund manager, who’s been offgrid since his company lost the $800 million stake in South African steel which contained Kyle’s savings.
Over a Tony Scott-like hailstorm of statistics and bar charts, the film begins with a warning from Lee to his viewers that’s also presumably intended as a shot across our bow. “Are you paying attention out there?” he barks. “Because it’s about to get complicated.” Except it really isn’t:
Money Monster is very straightforward. The bulk of the film is taken up with watching the simple plot hurtle towards its high-stakes conclusion. Though he’s at the heart of the action, O’Connell provides a lot of shouting and gun-waving but not much else. And it’s this lack of complexity at the film’s core that hobbles any loftier ambitions Foster might have held for it. But in the heat of the moment, Money
Monster’s bluster and nerve keeps you hooked.
Money Monster is released in UK cinemas on Friday May 27