Review: Money Monster

Money Monster stars George Clooney as Lee Gates, a shameless showman masquerading as a cable news financial expert. Dispensing advice as sound bites, he bolsters his bluster with hip-hop backup dancers, corny sound effects and campy clips from horror movies. He's not exactly a fraud, but his ego has made him too comfortable to do anything more than the needful.

It's business as usual for Lee and his long-suffering producer Patty Fenn (Julia Roberts) as they prepare for the day's live taping. The top story concerns Ibis Clear Capital, a company that has somehow lost $800 million of capital due to an algorithmic glitch. The company's corporate communications officer Diane Lester (Outlander's Caitriona Balfe) is there via satellite with her list of talking points to smooth things over. Lee is ready, what does he have to worry about when Patty always feeds him his lines and keeps him under control via his earpiece. Everything is copacetic until Patty notices a hoodied figure lurking in the wings on one of her monitors.

The mystery man is Kyle Budwell (Jack O'Connell), a young working-class man from Queens who, based on Lee's advice to "buy, buy, buy" Ibis stock, has lost his entire life savings. He's mad and he's not going to take it anymore. Forcing Lee into a bomb vest and brandishing a gun in one hand and a dead-man's switch in another, Kyle orders Patty to keep the cameras rolling or he'll blow them all to kingdom come. This is the situation they will all be in until someone from Ibis, preferably CEO Walt Camby (Dominic West), provides Kyle with a satisfactory explanation for the computer glitch.

Once all the players are in place, Money Monster becomes a symphony of shouts and whispers and a prime example of how several components - Matthew Libatique's elegant camerawork, Matt Chesse's rat-a-tat editing, and Jodie Foster's streamlined direction - harmonise to create an unflagging rhythm of activity. Money Monster may buckle under closer inspection - it's not quite as damning as it wants to be, the plot is preposterous at its root, and its comic sensibilities are schizophrenic - but this is an extremely well put together film.

The script by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore and Jim Kouf certainly has plenty to say about how the media aids and abets corporations' spin control on their malfeasance and how those who report the story may only realise their own complicity and moral obligation once they become a part of that story. A nod to Haskell Wexler's final image in Medium Cool would suggest that everyone, reporters and their audiences alike, bears a moral responsibility to question those in power. Yet it also (un)intentionally posits that nothing truly exists unless it's on camera. Films like Medium Cool and Network continue to be the modern-day benchmarks for the sociopolitically-minded work that Money Monster aspires to be, but those films stabbed with daggers and not butter knives. Money Monster has several sly moments - when Patty's instincts kick in and she directs a cameraman to move around Kyle for a better angle, when Kyle's pregnant girlfriend (Emily Meade) is brought in to intervene and instead hilariously shreds Kyle to pieces - that provide the sting of a million paper cuts and help to off-set more risible clunkers like when one man reveals himself to be married when he tells his mistress, "You know me better than my wife!"

Though Network is the obvious touchstone, Money Monster is closer in spirit to Howard Hawks' 1940 screwball comedy, His Girl Friday - so close, in fact, that one could mistake it for an updated re-working. In Hawks' film, Cary Grant's Walter Burns is a newspaper editor who does everything he can to convince ex-wife and star reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) from leaving her post and settling down with her bland soon-to-be husband. In Money Monster, Patty is about to fly out of the cuckoo's nest for a job where she presumably won't have to deal with a spoiled man-child. Lee may not orchestrate the chaos as Walter Burns does, but both high-pressure situations serve to prove that no one knows these particular men so well as these particular ladies. Of course, chemistry helps and though Clooney and Roberts spend most of the movie apart, they feel even more connected due to their relaxed and natural rapport.

Money Monster

Directed by: Jodie Foster

Written by: Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore, Jim Kouf

Starring: George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jack O'Connell, Dominic West, Caitriona Balfe, Giancarlo Esposito, Christopher Denham, Lenny Venito, Chris Bauer, Dennis Boutsikaris, Emily Meade