Money Monster Review

In the last three months of 2015, American cinema delivered two great films that delved into the concept of financial hardship, something that has been on everyone's mind since the 2008 Financial Crisis that dove our country into a financial pit. The first of these two motion pictures was 99 Homes, a drama centering on Andrew Garfield as an everyman trying to keep his head above water by working with the very man who tossed him, his mother and his young son out of their own home. Three months after 99 Homes came The Big Short, which took an appropriately stylized look at the events leading up to the market crash that sent the economy into a downward spiral.

Money Monster, the newest directorial effort from Jodie Foster, merges some of the basic concepts of both movies, namely the person of average financial status from 99 Homes and the anger at Wall Street fatcats that permeated The Big Short, but manages to lack the darker underbelly (as well as the finer filmmaking finesse and numerous other elements) that made those other two features so superb. Getting down to brass tacks, the plot of Money Monster concerns Lee Gates (George Clooney), the host of a TV show (entitled Money Monster) handing out stock investment advice to the populace. On what seems like a routine day, he finds himself held at gunpoint, live on the air, by a man by the name of Kyle Budwell (Jack O'Connell).

Kyle forces Lee to don a bomb vest, turning the level of chaos in this already volatile situation up to 11. The director of this show, Patty Fenn (Julia Roberts) communicates advice to Lee via an earpiece while trying to keep the show going and attempting to uncover a conspiracy at a shady company that Kyle invested into financially disastrous results. Let it not be said that the three screenwriters (Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore and Jim Kouf) in charge of this property don't have a sense for crafting strong tension, as the script makes the smart decision to mostly confine the proceedings to one location (the set of the in-universe TV show Money Monster). This storytelling choice allows for the tension between Lee and Kyle to be the at the center of the script, which in turns lets their dynamic bubble and simmer at a reasonable pace.

Unfortunately, the script is also riddled with a number of decisions that are, well, kinda baffling. There's a bizarre streak of humor in the first half of the film that doesn't gel at all with the more sobering story it's trying to tell and ends up overshadowing other elements of the motion picture that needed more attention. More craft goes into an extended gag about erectile dysfunction cream than into fleshing out main characters like Kyle and Patty, leaving those two as nothing more than just one-note archetypes. And then there are one or two moments where the humor strongly undercuts what could have been truly edge-of-your-seat intense moments. It's honestly shocking anybody thought these jarring moments of levity could co-exist in Money Monster with the more vehement vibe of the overall motion picture.

Mostly everything else in Money Monster rides along the line of mostly perfunctory, save for George Clooney (a guy who couldn't phone in a performance even if he was doing it via a phone call on a Blackberry). His character is a basic rich smug stereotype, and his frankness around the sad state of his life in the middle of the movie feels more than a little abrupt considering his personality up to that point, but at least Clooney doesn't slack off with making the character watchable thanks to his experience playing well-realized morally imperfect characters in the likes of the far far far far superior Up In The Air and Burn After Reading. Jack O'Connell is fine as Kyle, even if he feels like he's ill-suited for this part. He looks and is written more like Hollywood's concept of a financially strapped guy (Look! He's got scraggly facial hair and a coat! He must be poor!) rather than what that person would be in real life and it becomes more than a tad distracting.

Having enjoyed director Jodie Foster's 2011 effort The Beaver, it must be said that her work here is more standard when compared to that previous effort, especially in the most basic visual sense since the majority of the sequences set inside the TV station where Money Monster is shot have a distracting blue tint to them that took me right out of the movie. But the rest of her directing isn't bad, though that's kind of the overall problem with Money Monster. There's very little in it that's egregiously bad, but most of its players are just going through the motions despite repeatedly demonstrating in the past how they're clearly capable of so much more. With more work and thought put into it (especially in regards to the brazenly tidy conclusion), perhaps Money Monster could have been (oh boy, I'm sure you all saw this pun coming a mile away) far more rich as an engrossing thriller.