Jumbled yet Satisfactory
Jodie Foster's Money Monster rages against the financial industry and the TV journalists who cover it, but never congeals into the tight thriller you want it to be. Lee Gates (George Clooney), a Jim Cramer-like, sensationalistic TV financial guru is taken hostage during the live broadcast of his show, Money Monster, when Kyle Budwell (Jack O'Connell) enters the studio with a gun and forces Lee to put on a bomb vest. Kyle demands answers for losing all of his money on a "can't fail" stock tip Lee had touted weeks earlier, lest Kyle remove his finger from the button keeping the vest intact. Lee's producer Patty (Julia Roberts) works to keep her host and crew alive while tracking down what went wrong and who's to blame as the NYPD plans to get inside and diffuse the situation.
Many excellent films exist about the shortcomings and greed of the top players on Wall Street—like Oliver Stone's Wall Street and Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street—but Money Monster starts as a film about a fresher subject: the financial journalists who expounded on great investments but who didn't seem to see the 2008 collapse coming before it was too late (though the collapse doesn't factor into the story here). Money Monster seems to be an incisive takedown of these characters from the outset (Lee's show is basically a parody of Jim Cramer's Mad Money), but it moves from tense drama to light humor to crusading righteousness over and over again, all while slipping the blame to the CEO of the firm in which Kyle invested. (Money Monster works as a redemption for Lee, and he admits to his many faults, but the filmmakers take their eye off the ball by going after the Wall Street players themselves).
Granted, tonal shifts can work well, and injecting humor into this film works more often than not—including a darkly funny moment when the NYPD tries to get through to Kyle by using his girlfriend, and things don't go as planned—but it ultimately feels like Foster and screenwriters Alan Di Fiore, Jim Kouf and Jamie Linden tried to put two or three different movies into one. What starts as a teardown of bad financial journalism ends as a teardown of financial industry greed, and the latter has been done better elsewhere. Thematically, the film should feel like Jon Stewart's 2009 interview with Jim Cramer on The Daily Show, but that rage gets re-directed from Lee Gates to a target that's much easier to hit.
For all of these tonal and storytelling missteps, Money Monster still works quite well as a fun, B-movie thriller. Foster demonstrates here that she is a fine director, if unremarkable, and her film is fast-paced enough to keep you from questioning the mostly believable plot. Clooney fleshes out what could easily be a two-dimensional character in Gates, and he's well cast as a natural charmer who seems genuinely unsettled when cowering from a gunman. Lee's lack of confidence and substance is the perfect contrast for Clooney to play given his real life persona as a fun-loving prankster and humanitarian. Roberts is unsurprisingly winning as the uber competent Patty, and her palpable chemistry with Clooney is put to good use as she practically plays mother to his man-child. Jack O'Connell is sympathetic as Kyle, and he imbues him with more smarts than you'd expect while still making him a grounded, blue collar guy.
Money Monster is like a summer blockbuster for adults. It frankly doesn't work as well as it could, and without Clooney and Roberts the film would be far less engaging, but their talents and Foster's ability to keep things moving along make Money Monster a perfectly satisfactory piece of entertainment.