Jodie Foster's Money Monster touches on two topical subjects. First, Wall Street's greed and how its casino logic can destroy lives; second, the obscene realism of live broadcast and how the producers and audience are both complicit in turning private lives into public spectacle. Big social issues, both of them, and with George Clooney and Julia Roberts in the lead and Foster directing, we expected a smart blast.
What we get, however, is underwhelming. Money Monster is an uneven, predictable jibe at the pornographic excesses of the financial market -- a sometimes funny black comedy based on an idea that could've been done much better than this.
Say, like The Big Short, which splits open the brains of Wall Street wizards with a knife so sharp it gives you a laugh and a chill. In contrast, Money Monster is built on a pretty blunt set-up: Clooney plays Lee Gates, a vulgar host of a financial TV programme who dishes out irresponsible advice on investment. Roberts is Patty Fenn, his producer, who seems more decent than the gaudy show she is directing.
In the studio as the show goes live, an armed man sneaks in and takes Gates hostage, forcing him to wear a bomb vest; he is Kyle Budwell (Jack O'Connell), a man who's lost all his savings on a recently-tanked stock after Gates recommended his viewers to buy it, and now Kyle wants the world to know -- it's hardly a revelation -- that the whole system is rigged so that the rich will get richer and the poor poorer. To wit, Kyle wants his hostage-taking to go live on TV, and Fenn, the producer, obliges, first out of fear then out of instinct when she realises that this freak show, with guns and bombs and an angry man out for a moralistic revenge against the evil Wall Street, is something the audience exactly wants to see.
Money Monster is, at best or perhaps at worst, a liberal guilt trip. But it's all just an act, it smacks of triumphalism of the ones who believe they're siding with the 99%. As a satire of the inhuman financial sector, the film has some darkly comical moments -- like when Gates fails to spin stock prices by betting his life on it -- though it is pretty much devoid of genuine fangs. As a satire of reality TV, well, doesn't this come a little too late, say almost 20 years after The Truman Show?
Money Monster
Starring Julia Roberts, George Clooney.
Directed by Jodie Foster.
