A miasma of pure silliness settles on this movie directed by Jodie Foster, showing here in Cannes out of competition; it deserves a genre of its own: screwball action. Julia Roberts plays a harassed TV producer who has to keep in line her waning star: Lee Gates, played by George Clooney, the ego-crazed, silver-fox presenter of a TV show called Money Monster, giving stock picks and spurious shock-jock-type commentary on the market, celebrating unfettered capitalism by breaking into embarrassingly geriatric hip-hop moves with backing dancers. (He reportedly bears a certain resemblance to a real-life pundit: Jim Cramer, presenter of a programme called Mad Money, on CNBC.)
One day, Lee tips a company which trades in ultra-sophisticated financial derivatives and this firm loses $800m, taking down the life savings of many little people – including a truck driver called Kyle Budwell, played by Jack O’Connell, who breaks onto the set and holds Lee at gunpoint on live TV, making him wear a Semtex suicide-bomber vest, and demanding he apologise and explain to all the ordinary people who have been screwed by Wall Street.
It has to be said that the movie does not entirely convince as a white-knuckle thriller: the tension isn’t all that tense, and audiences are entitled to wonder from the outset how it is that Kyle has manage to breeze past security and how this dirt-poor guy has managed to find the materials to build a complex bomb. Money Monster isn’t terribly original either: it features the standard-issue tough female TV executive familiar from Network, Broadcast News and Nightcrawler. And to top it all off, it’s not exactly red-hot satire: the film isn’t particularly interested in challenging the system.
It needs hardly to be said that Clooney’s character is kind of a good guy really, and with some effrontery, Jodie Foster’s film even shows him and Roberts starting to do a little real investigative journalism into how exactly this company managed to mislay all those millions of dollars, and who the real villains are — even as gorgeous George has a gun at his head and sticks of TNT pressed to his vital organs.
But it’s fun, and undoubtedly watchable. Clooney carries off the absurdity of his position with some deadpan flair, and a tiny twinkle of camp. He is to this film what Leslie Nielsen was the Zucker/Abrahams comedies, and Roberts functions well as his exasperated straight-woman.
And something else needs to be said in this film’s defence. Despite its obvious conservatism, and its outrageous silliness, it is actually more clear-sighted and certainly less pompous than the hugely overrated Oscar-winner and liberal dinner-party favourite, The Big Short. Money Monster does insist that, for all the money guys’ smoke-and-mirror waffle about how trading algorithms go well beyond the control and understanding of the nay-sayers, wrongdoing is a simple matter of flesh-and-blood people committing fraud, lying and breaking the law in a way that everyone can understand and do something about. This is no masterpiece, but it’s amiable slice of popcorn entertainment.
