MAY 16, 2016
If you’ve ever seen the financial advice show “Mad Money” on CNBC, you may come away with a “What the hell was that?” reaction after your first viewing. The show is a weird mix of stock tips and show biz razzmatazz, and its ringleader/host is Jim Cramer, an over-caffeinated rolled-up-shirtsleeves kind of guy who likes to yell at the camera. Imagine Louis C.K. after 50 Red Bulls, and you’ll get a pretty good idea of what an hour with Jim Cramer is like.
George Clooney is clearly not Jim Cramer, but in director Jodie Foster’s latest film “Money Monster,” Clooney plays Lee Gates, the host of a similar kind of stock tips program. Whereas Cramer sometimes tries to bludgeon you into buying his recommended stocks, Clooney’s Gates is much smoother, with a “I know you adore me, so buy this stock” kind of approach in between the razzmatazz moments. (I have to hand it to Clooney — “Money Monster” features two hip-hop dancers, and the 55 year-old star keeps up with them every step of the way.)
The financial fluff is shattered, however, with the appearance on-camera of Kyle Budwell, a desperate young man with a gun and a grudge. It seems that Kyle (Jack O’Connell) put all of his money into a stock recommended by Gates on “Money Monster,” and it went south, leaving him with nothing. As he forces Gates at gunpoint to put on a vest filled with explosives, Kyle wants some answers.
All this is occurring on live television, and at the helm in the control room is the show’s producer/director Patty Fenn (Julia Roberts), who has the dual task of whispering reassuring lines into Gates’ earpiece for him to calm the gunman and getting her people quickly and safely out of the building. As Kyle begins to tell his story on live TV, Americans begin to tune in in bars and gyms all over the country as the drama unfolds, eventually ending up live in the streets of New York.
As a director, Foster has not been known as having a particularly distinctive style. She plunks down the camera and lets her actors go, but her impressive ability to elicit top performances from her casts is what she’s famed for, and “Money Monster” is no exception. Of course, when you cast George Clooney and Julia Roberts, you don’t have to do much. You have yourself an old-fashioned movie-star movie, and these two have such a natural chemistry together that it’s like a warm bath. Just lie back and let their star power wash all over you.
The wild card here is O’Connell, an English actor who is on the verge of stardom — he was quite good as the star of Angelina Jolie’s film “Unbroken” and superb in the Irish behind-enemy lines thriller “’71” last year. Here he lays on his “New Yawk” accent a little thickly (though I know some New Yorkers who talk like this, so I’ll cut him a little slack), but more importantly, he communicates the intense desperation of his character. If “Money Monster” was a little bit better, this would have been a star-making part for him.
Many people have compared the satiric themes about television in “Money Monster” to Sidney Lumet’s “Network,” but I don’t think it’s fair to compare the occasional anti-TV jibes here to Paddy Chayefsky’s evisceration of the medium in that 1976 masterpiece. This film is much closer to the spirit of “Dog Day Afternoon” directed by Sidney Lumet (who also directed “Network”) where the panic involved in a not-quite-thought-through hostage plan turned into a brilliant mix of comedy and suspense, a tone to which “Money Monster” aspires but never quite reaches.
That being said, “Money Monster” is still an enjoyable night at the movies. But with a little more thought, it could have been so much more.
GRADE: B-
