Money Monster (2016)

Jodie Foster directs this 2016 hostage thriller with a steady hand and a clear thesis: the men who move money are not to be trusted. George Clooney plays Lee Gates, a television financial personality whose on-air endorsement of a corporation costs a working-class viewer his entire savings. When that viewer arrives at the studio with a gun and a vest of clay, the film settles into a two-hour argument about who deserves our sympathy. The answer arrives early and never wavers. Wall Street is a casino, the house always wins, and the little man gets the bill. This is a film that knows its enemy and names him.

The socioeconomic anger is the engine here, and it runs hot. Kyle Budwell loses sixty thousand dollars to a rigged trade, then loses his dignity when his pregnant girlfriend berates him on live television, and the film treats his rage as righteous. The villain, a chief executive played by Dominic West, is brought down by Icelandic hackers, a South African platinum mine, and a passport discrepancy. The plotting is elaborate, the moral is simple, and the final punch Clooney throws lands with the weight of a closing argument. Reviewers at the time compared it unfavorably to The Big Short and Network, which is fair. Those films had a scalpel. This one has a sledgehammer, and it swings.

On matters of identity the film is largely incurious. Foster sits in the director's chair and Julia Roberts and Caitriona Balfe occupy competent positions of authority, but the conflict is never framed as gendered. Giancarlo Esposito appears as a police captain, a Korean programmer briefs the team from Seoul, and the South African mine workers exist as a plot device about corporate corruption instead of a racial one. The cast is white, the message is economic, and the film has no interest in anything else. It wants us angry about money. It succeeds, modestly, and then it ends.