Mon­ey Monster

Facile doesn’t even scrape the sur­face when describ­ing the lat­est direc­to­r­i­al effort by Jodie Fos­ter. The title refers to a stock tip tabloid show host­ed by Lee Gates (George Clooney), the kind of hard-ball econ­o­mist pow­er­house who mix­es watered-down trad­ing spec­u­la­tion with booty-grind­ing hip-hop danc­ing and wear­ing a dol­lar-green top hat.

Turns out that one of his triple lock insid­er steers was actu­al­ly a bit of a lemon, and one crazy kid (Jack O’Connell) who lit­er­al­ly bet the house on Ibis Cap­i­tal going nuclear was left short changed to the tune of 60 large. And so, he waltzes on to the set of Mon­ey Mon­ster dur­ing a live trans­mis­sion, dress­es Lee up in a bomb jack­et, screams ​“this is fuck­ing bull­shit!” over and over, and threat­ens to turn the pre­sen­ter into an oleagi­nous mulch if he doesn’t get some answers, and stat. For rea­sons that remain an unhap­py mys­tery, they need to broad­cast this ad-hoc siege live to the whole planet.

Noth­ing what­so­ev­er in this film rings true. Clooney looks like he’s in a nox­ious haze, drift­ing back to the days of B‑thriller filler like The Peace­mak­er and seem­ing­ly hap­py to play it par­o­dy-lev­el rote as a way of land­ing some punch­es on those Wall Street fat cats. If you watch this film and aren’t able to pre­dict exact­ly – exact­ly! – how it’s going to play out with­in the first five min­utes, then you might want to throw in the tow­el with movies and seek out some oth­er form of enter­tain­ment. The plot is like a dri­ver­less jug­ger­naut rolling slow­ly, inex­orably towards you – there is no pos­si­bil­i­ty that it might ran­dom­ly swerve out the way, your fate is sealed.

And despite its best inten­tions, it actu­al­ly suc­ceeds in mak­ing you see the log­ic of so-called greedy invest­ment bankers who whisk up crack­pot schemes in order to make their shares look entic­ing to poten­tial buy­ers. Julia Roberts plays direc­tor Pat­ty Fenn, the calm­ing pres­ence in the booth who whis­pers orders and info to the hot-shot pre­sen­ter. Her inclu­sion in the film is as a human plot motor, essen­tial­ly order­ing min­ions to make phone calls, mash lap­top keys and hit Google hard and fast to keep things tick­ing. If you thought The Big Short dilut­ed com­plex mar­ket eco­nom­ics for the mass­es, then this pul­veris­es it, blends it, stirs in a heaped spoon­ful of sug­ar and forces it in your mouth while mak­ing coo­ing air­plane noises.

It’s a film with absolute­ly noth­ing going on. There are times where you’re even forced into think­ing this must be some kind of sym­bol­ist metaphor as so lit­tle makes sense. It asks that we hold invest­ment firms to account and that we take mea­sures to, if not pre­vent, then at least assuage their inborn avarice. As George and Jack’s high-stakes shout­ing match plays out on live TV, the world tunes in, wait­ing to see how it’ll all turn out.

Telling­ly, when the cam­eras final­ly stop rolling and next show starts, the once-rapt audi­ence go back to their lives as if noth­ing has hap­pened. Per­haps this is Fos­ter sug­gest­ing that, in this cli­mate of hyper­bol­ic media fren­zy, we’ve become immune to life’s authen­tic dra­mas. Or, it might just be that every­one saw if for what it was: a light diver­sion that didn’t abide by any forms of west­ern log­ic and offered no food for fur­ther thought.