Money Monster

As host of the wildly popular television investment show Money Monster, Lee Gates (George Clooney: Hail, Caesar!) enjoys a celebrity lifestyle. Rather than sound investment advice, he touts stocks recommended by his rich friends. Viewers trust him, but his producer Patty (Julia Roberts: Mother’s Day) is fed up.
    When a favorite recommendation, trading company IBIS, takes a dive, his audience loses lots of money. Outraged victim Kyle (Jack O’Connell: Unbroken) decides to make Lee and his fat-cat friends answer for their corruption. Kyle enters the studio, pulls a gun and straps a bomb on Lee, threatening to blow him and the studio sky-high if answers aren’t immediately forthcoming.
    Suddenly, Lee cares about the little guy. As he placates his captor and investigates the IBIS stock incident, he sees that Kyle might be right. The system might be rigged.
    Can Kyle prove that finance companies steal for profit? Will Lee finally understand that his actions have consequences? Can Patty keep it all on the air?
    Long, tone-deaf and utterly misguided, Money Monster is awe-inspiring in its poor choices. Director Jodie Foster (Elysium) seems to have released a terrible first draft that, might, with time, have been elevated. Performances are perfunctory, dialog uninspiring and camera angles rote.
    Foster prefers close-ups and medium shots that frame single actors. As a result, the dialogue sounds like a string of soliloquies edited together. The characters don’t seem to be reacting to each other, which in turn distances the audience.
    Clooney, a natural ham, seems annoyed with all of it, even when he’s dancing with money-honeys. It may be his reaction to O’Connell — who offered one of 2015’s best performances in ’71 — but here is relegated to screaming and flailing. O’Connell’s Kyle shrieks that he’s intelligent, yet he’s pathologically terrible at making decisions and expressing himself. He’s a frustrating character because he’s so poorly written. Roberts spends most of the film locked in a box.
    With Foster’s ham-fisted directing, this movie ranges from loud to louder to loudest. Do not pay to see this film — in the theater or on Netflix.

Dismal Thriller • R • 98 mins.