Money Monster is about a grandiloquent TV personality/Wall Street
guru named Lee Gates (George Clooney) who finds himself and his crew taken
hostage during a live broadcast by a disgruntled investor armed with a gun and
a bomb named Kyle Budwell (Jack O’Connell).
Kyle has just lost all of his life savings for following Lee’s previous
tip of investing on a bullish company called IBIS, which unfortunately lost
$800 million worth of investments, including Kyle’s, due to a glitch in its
trading algorithm. With the help of his
director Patty Fenn (Julia Roberts) giving instructions to his earpiece, Lee
must overcome his fear and rely on his talking skills to defuse the situation,
save their lives, and uncover what really happened with IBIS.
This movie is a decent thriller. It’s not quite excellent, but it still provides
solid tension and tells a moderately well-written story. It’s generally smart, though not as cerebral
as I wanted it to be. It also has a
genuinely intriguing message to tell, regardless of whether you buy it or not.
The strong performances
essentially carry the occasionally wobbly narrative. George Clooney and Julia Roberts are veteran
actors, so being compelling in their roles is something kind of expected already
from them. Jack O’Connell, on the other
hand, is someone I’m not familiar with prior to this movie, but he’s pretty good in this
movie as well.
Among these three, I
enjoyed seeing Julia the most. She used
to be a very big deal back in the 90’s, but she doesn’t have much Hollywood
presence these days. It has been a while
since I last saw her in a movie (the most recent movie I saw that starred Julia
prior to Money Monster was the 2006 animated
film The Ant Bully – the most recent
live-action one was 2004’s Ocean’s Twelve). In my opinion, she had the best performance in this movie.
All in all, Money Monster is sufficiently entertaining. But among this year’s films, it’s not something
that will stand out. It’s nice seeing Julia Roberts again in a movie though.
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