A stunned Lumet is an apt description of the Jodie Foster helmed MONEY MONSTER.
In what enticingly promises to be Network meets Dog Day Afternoon,
MONEY MONSTER merely becomes a dog’s breakfast of a movie, where the dog doesn’t even get a whiff of the fat cat.
Star power cannot surmount a simpering script, and the screenplay by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore and Jim Koufe gives George Clooney and Julia Roberts nowhere to go but down.
Frank Pierson won a well deserved Oscar for Dog Day Afternoon as did Paddy Chayefsky for Network. These three hacks seem incapable of writing a (money) laundry list.
The set up is that a disgruntled mug investor storms the TV studio which screens the Lee Gates show, a facile financial show whose host is cheesier than a stick of Stilton and stinkier, a fatuous fiscal fraudster who should be put into stocks and bonds instead of spruiking about them.
The deranged dunderhead takes the host hostage with the same pudding headed planning he staked his claim on the cash calamity that cost him his meagre monies.
The programme’s producer, Patty, a gal who looks like she hit the glass ceiling with such ferocity that she is critically, constantly concussed,- or her bruised and bloated lips, at least -tries to balance calm compassion with catastrophe, not for once thinking how to helm this hostage scenario into a ratings winner. Now that would have been interesting.
The sloppy script is compounded by monstrous miscasting.
George Clooney, a likeable loony in the hands of the Coens, here seems gormless and charmless as the grating Lee Gates.
Julia Roberts as Patty is as believable as a kosher swineherd and Jack O’Connell as the bankrupt kidnapper looks as if he wishes the explosives strapped to his chest were real so he could detonate his way out of the picture.
Predictable, pointless, and puerile, – what’s with the erectile dysfunction cream joke that furphies the funny bone and then left limp as a muddled MacGuffin – MONEY MONSTER is neither bull nor bear, fish or fowl, its currency is inflated with self importance and the characterisations are as colourless as an internet transaction.
A debit to all concerned – flat photography, enervating editing, nondescript score – MONEY MONSTER is as drab as a dung coloured dollar.
MONEY MONSTER is GFC – God awFul Cinema, that makes one pine for pictures like Network and Dog Day Afternoon.