There was a lot working against this movie, but there was also a lot that I was excited about. I'm about as big a George Clooney fan as you will find. Between The Beaver and her TV show stints (Orange is the New Black, House of Cards), Jodie Foster has proven herself as a talented director. And who doesn't like Julia Roberts? I wanted to be wrong about this movie. I really did.
The idea of the movie is that George Clooney plays Lee Gates, a cable investment guru (Think, Mad Money). During a live show, a gunman (Jack O'Connell) holds the studio hostage because he wants answers for a financial crash that he lost everything on. It's an interesting premise. I'll be the first to admit that I have only a tenuous understanding of how Wall Street and the stock market work, so I like the idea of trying to get answers. The movie is presented in trailers as a claustrophobic thriller: a tap dance of wits between a hostage and the man holding the gun to his head.
Ok, enough talking around this. I hated this movie. So much.
It was bad. The story makes little of no sense. The characters are poorly drawn out. The ways events play out are completely unearned and implausible. I can't even formulate a breakdown of everything wrong with this. There's such a plurality of problems that all I can do is list a few.
(It's pretty much "spoiler alert" from here on...don't see the movie. That's all I really have to say)
How the hell does O'Connell's character get all the way into the studio unstopped? He just happens to know the inner workings of the building from the delivery room to the studio. He had all the locks he needed and scouted for entry points. There is no way that comes together that smoothly, especially given that O'Connell is not playing a smart man.
How does O'Connell know how to make a convincing enough bomb to make experts think that it's real? I know nothing about making a bomb. I have to assume it's not that easy to make one that would fool the top NYC bomb experts who are undoubtedly being called in for this. It's made repeatedly clear that O'Connell is playing an uneducated man, so how does he do that. Better yet, when the police somehow determine that breaking the wireless receiver will render the bomb useless their only solution is to shoot George Clooney to break it. That is lunacy!
What are so many people still doing in the control room for so long? I don't know much about nuts and bolts TV production (which will come up again later), but are there really that many people in the control room who would be considered essential personnel in that situations? Everyone is astoundingly not panicked.
How does the CCO of IBS, the central evil company in the movie, completely turn on her company and boyfriend in the matter of a couple hours? This movie features numerous baffling character transformations that make no sense. The biggest occurs in Diane Lester, the Central Communications Officer for IBS (played by Caitriona Balfa). That's a top executive at the company. She is, as it turns out, the CEO's mistress. Also, she completely buys into the CEO's claims of transparency and being a good guy. She's a zealot for the company if there ever was one. It makes no sense that she would go to such lengths to uncover the conspiracy at the center of this movie. And how was she not kicked out of that building by security?
What exactly causes George Clooney to have a change of heart about everything that he's built his career on for a guy threatening his life? This doesn't make any sense either. Clooney has a lunatic with a gun pointed at him and an "explosive" vest, and he decides to have a change of heart because, what, the cops shoot at him (which was a stupid move all around) and the IBS CEO won't return his calls. It's not like the movie builds Lee Gates as some former investigative journalist who lost his way. He's just an investment guy with some showmanship. There is not way he would start siding with the gunman out of a mild-curiosity.
Doesn't the fact that Clooney couldn't get IBS's stock to go up invalidate the entirety of O'Connell's argument for why he's holding everyone hostage? Maybe I missed something with this. O'Connell has Clooney at gunpoint because O'Connell believes that Clooney wields some sort of power. That's why O'Connell invested his money in IBS in the first place; Clooney said to do that on his show. When Clooney's plea to buy the IBS stock doesn't work, doesn't that prove that Clooney has no power?
Who exactly am I supposed to be rooting for, anyway? Even if I'm buying into this movie, there's no protagonist. O'Connell is a complete fool. He made a mistake and is threatening peoples' lives because he doesn't want to accept responsibility. Clooney really hasn't done a single thing wrong, but I think I'm supposed to believe that he's to blame for Wall Street or something stupid. I guess Julia Roberts is pretty guiltless. But this movie clearly wants me to side with O'Connell by the end and I don't at all. He is completely at fault in every way.
How do Clooney and O'Connell safely walk through downtown Manhattan? You're telling me that there's not a single crazy person with a gun there? And, I mean, once it's clear that Clooney is guiding O'Connell down the street, I'm pretty sure that makes him a conspirator too. Clear out an area and take them both down with bean bag guns or something. Don't just let a damn bomb walk down the street in a major city.
How the hell does that TV show get produced so smoothly from a van? I don't care how good the crew is, there is no way that they assemble a mobile reporting crew that easily and effectively. In fact, the quality of the broadcast once they leave the studio might be the biggest logical leap of all the stupid leaps in this movie.
Why and how would the IBS CEO even commit the central fraud in the first place? I guess the blanket answer of "greed" is the answer to 'why', but it sure as hell is a lazy one. The 'how' makes no sense. A company that big - how is he able to work with such complete autonomy? He's able to change the way the entire computer system works on a whim. In a company that large there would be a trail, probably an easy to follow one of everything he does. Someone as high up as the COO wouldn't need to track down the [apparently] one Korean programmer the company ever hired and have him given her cryptic clues to figure out what's happening. That makes no sense!
I keep thinking back to The Big Short. I also disliked that movie a lot. The difference is that The Big Short is a well-made movie that I just didn't like. Money Monster is a movie that I didn't like that is also just plain badly made. It actually makes George Clooney look like a bad actor. It wastes Julia Roberts entirely. The story is rubbish. The screenplay is a mess. The tone is all wrong and/or inconsistent. The characters are thin and not developed. A couple funny lines and a poorly thought out corporate conspiracy are not enough to save this. This is a garbage movie. I can't be any nicer about it.
Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend
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