Financial TV guru Lee Gates (George Clooney) is a beloved and trusted individual. While he’s overly pompous and clearly in love with himself, he’s entertaining enough that people actually want to see him talk about the stock market and give his tips and pointers on who to invest in. But after awhile, all of the betting, predicting and fun comes to a grinding halt when a guy named Kyle (Jack O’Connell) shows up in the studio during a live taping, armed, dangerous and demanding answers. To what? Well, turns out that Kyle put all of his money into a company that went bankrupt and apparently, Lee and his show are the ones to be blamed.
For as long as he’s possible able to, Kyle plans on being live on the air, holding a gun to Lee’s head and waiting for some answers to his questions from those who are responsible. Meanwhile, in the studio, Lee’s longtime director (Julia Roberts) is working her absolute hardest to keep Lee alive, while also making sure that the truth gets out about these big banks and corporations feeding off the middle and low class.
“Money Monster,” if anything, has an intriguing premise that you could do a lot with. And, for the first 20 minutes or so, it seems like the movie is going to do just that. Jodie Foster may not always be the most competent director out there, but what she does right in the beginning of “Money Monster” sets the stage, with the right bits and pieces of character, plot, setting and mystery that makes it feel like wherever it goes next, you’ll be on board until the end. And heck, the fact that its main agenda is to call out those responsible for robbing this economy blind, without ever fessing up and/or apologizing, made it all the more exciting to watch.
And then, well, it all goes downhill.
Unfortunately, Foster loses control of what could have been a taut and intense thriller. While it may seem like, from the beginning, “Money Monster” will just be a small, contained thriller, it turns out that the movie wants to be a lot bigger than that; after awhile, it starts incorporating more and more subplots about Kyle’s personal life, a bank that’s involved with Kyle’s situation, the owner of that bank, a trusted employee of that bank, TV culture, rich versus poor, and yes, so much more. In a movie that’s barely an hour and a half, and for more than half of that features two dudes in a TV studio, it’s already too much.
That’s fine, if you want your story to have a greater importance than just being “crazy guy decides to hold TV studio hostage,” but it doesn’t work here. The ideas and subplots the movie brings up don’t always mesh well and, more often than not, feel as if they’re thrown in there to create a bit of tension or excitement. However, what’s infuriating about “Money Monster” is how the promise in having an exciting, and sometimes fun, thriller was there from the beginning, it just gets lost in a sea of conspiracy theories that seem half-baked, twists and turns that come out of nowhere and make absolutely no sense and paper-thin characters that we never grow to learn, or even care about.
Save for George Clooney as Lee Gates.
It’s obvious that Lee Gates is supposed to come across as a hybrid between Donny Deutsch and Jim Cramer, but after awhile, you almost forget about this idea and just take the character, and the performance, for what it is. This is mostly due to the fact that no matter how hard he tries to make us think differently, George Clooney is an absolute movie star who can play any role and do just about anything, with anyone, regardless of how thin a script may be. And yes, this script is very thin, but somehow Clooney finds ways to make this character fun to watch and listen to, while also interesting, in that we want to figure out more about him when he isn’t on the screen, talking about money and acting like a jackass. We get inklings of that sprinkled throughout, but none of it is as compelling as it should be, even if Clooney tries his hardest to make it as such.
The only reason why I go on and on about Clooney is that he’s the best part of the whole thing, specifically the cast. Julia Roberts is fine, but doesn’t really do anything we haven’t seen before; Jack O’Connell is working with the weirdest Brooklyn accent, and doesn’t ever have much depth to him; and, in what has to be the most bafflingly unexplained accent since whatever the hell Kevin Costner was doing in Robin Hood, Caitriona Balfe speaks in such a way here that I’m still scratching my head about it. I know that she’s Irish, and you get brief glimpses of that in her speech here, but other times it’ll sound like she’s trying to do an American accent, and because she’s Irish, she sounds more like a sad Texan. Then, other times, her English is so off that she just decides to go for Irish. I don’t know if the movie was making it appear as if she was from Ireland, but honestly, every moment she was on the screen I was so distracted and mind-boggled that I could hardly care about anything else that was happening at the moment.
Then again, that’s how I felt throughout most of the movie.
If anything, I give a movie like “Money Monster” credit for being a real-time thriller that at least attempts to attack those on Wall Street. Foster may not know how to handle all of the different threads of plot here, but what she does know how to do is get her point across; it’s as ham-fisted as can possibly be, but it’s still nice to see in such a mainstream flick as this, where the people in the movie are probably a lot richer than the people they’re supposedly fighting against.
But who cares? It’s Hollywood.Consensus: Despite it having something to say, “Money Monster” really loses control of its promising premise, with an overabundance of story, a poor script and a frenzied direction that doesn’t always know when to slow down, or make sense of things that are happening.
4 / 10Dan O’Neill is currently a journalism student at Temple University. He can be reached at tuf73940@temple.edu.
