Clooney’s cash crisis is about to explode
Money Monster (15) Verdict: Worth a punt ★★★✩✩
JODIE FOSTER’S modestly pleasurable new film stars George Clooney as a stocks and shares tipster called Lee Gates. Slick, self-satisfied and sexist (and apparently modelled on the reallife presenter of U.S. cable show Mad Money), Lee hosts a show called Money Monster.
His director is Patty Fenn (Julia Roberts), who knows there’s a decent-ish guy lurking beneath the brashness, but that hasn’t stopped her looking for jobs elsewhere.
Both their lives change on the day that a disaffected speculator, a young $14-an-hour truck driver called Kyle Budwell (rising British star Jack O’Connell), gets into the studio posing as a delivery man.
He is deeply upset, possibly murderous, having blown all his savings on a seemingly dud tip that Lee blithely issued a few weeks before. Kyle’s $60,000 was lost in an afternoon. Now, at gunpoint and live on air, half-- demented with righteous anger, Kyle forces Lee to wear a vest loaded with explosives, which he can detonate merely by taking his thumb off a button. So although NYPD’s finest are quickly on the scene, shooting Kyle will mean letting off the bomb.
At first, all this seems to be heading into classic hostage-thriller territory, a static version of the 1994 film Speed, but gradually it becomes clear that what Foster is really giving us is a satirical black comedy.
There are some laugh-out-loud moments, not least when Kyle’s pregnant girlfriend is brought in to appeal to him to give himself up, yet contrives to make the situation immeasurably worse.
In some ways, Foster and her screenwriters try to hit too many targets, satirising reality television as well as the mystifying world of high finance.
Meanwhile, underneath all this, is a simpler and more old-fashioned story of moral redemption, as Lee realises the errors of his ways. But this scattergun approach is entertaining enough.
Money Monster is not a film likely to propel you to the edge of your seat, possibly not even halfway forward, but it’s a stylish crowd-pleaser.