Review: Money Monster

Money Monster (15)

USA 2016 99 mins Dir: Jodie Foster Cast: George Clooney, Jack O’Connell, Julia Roberts, Giancarlo Esposito, Dominic West, Caitriona Balfe

A topical finance thriller that owes more to the pulpy nature of Phone Booth than the starkly brutal insight of Margin Call, Money Monster nevertheless emerges as yet another enjoyable directorial diversion for Jodie Foster. The Oscar-winning actress has previously demonstrated a solid touch with intimate dramas Little Man Tate and The Beaver but here she goes hell-for-leather with the pacy thrills, demonstrating a perhaps surprising knack for the mechanics of suspense building.

Fittingly enough as one our most accomplished actresses, she’s able to elicit fine performances out of her ensemble cast, including an impressively unctuous George Clooney who leads as smug TV host Lee Gates. Presenter of the truly awful Money Monster show, in which Gates ostensibly offers sound financial advice to stocks and shares investors, he’s a man unable to connect with anything or anyone outside of his heavily manufactured studio image.

Behind the scenes is Gates’ long-suffering director Patty Fenn (an effectively understated Julia Roberts), whose decision to accept another job may already be too late: one senses she has already sold her soul to the devil by working on the morally bankrupt show. But everyone, presenters, directors and camera crew alike, get a sharp, violent dose of reality when disgruntled, gun-toting Kyle Budwell (Jack O’Connell) storms the set and pierces the programme’s vacuous bubble. Kyle demands answers as to why he has lost everything via a computer ‘glitch’ with IBIS Clear Capital, a company which has cost investors a horrifying $800m and yet who Gates verbally endorsed on-air.

Despite its chilling numerary trappings, there’s no denying that Money Monster works best as both a confined character thriller and a devious satire on the crass nature of reality TV. The grotesque nuances of the Money Monster programme itself with its dreadful cos-play introductions and Gates’ hamming to camera are observed with no small amount of relish by Foster.

Following Kyle’s unforeseen arrival, the tension ruthlessly builds as he straps a bomb to Gates whilst Patty scrambles to get IBIS’ representatives on-camera for an explanation, finding herself in the uncomfortable position of using her live TV skills to direct a real-life crisis. Foster is quite unashamed in playing it all for rip-roaring thrills, all laced with a delicious irony and dark humour that only intensifies as the situation worsens.

Yet what really makes it work is the odd-couple chemistry between Clooney and O’Connell, the former assaying a vacuum of a man who finds himself making a valuable connection with the vulnerable Kyle. In-keeping with his explosive roles in both Starred Up and ‘71, O’Connell utilises his entire physicality to keep the audience on tenterhooks throughout, thoroughly convincing as an explosive young man who may be less in-control than he thinks.

Although credulity is increasingly strained towards the climax, Dominic West’s slimy IBIS CEO emerging as an all-too-easy villain amidst a plethora of implausible plot developments, the sheer rollicking sense of piece carries the viewer through to the end. Like the recent, real-life financial crash, it’s only in the wake of all the destruction that the mess really comes into view.