Money Monster Review
Money Monster is a well done film that trudges familiar ground, and confusingly has more missed opportunities than I would have liked. The actors all do a serviceable job, and I think many people will enjoy this film, but I can't help but feel that it was one step away from being great.
George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and everyone else in this film does a really nice job. I believe that they are the characters, and I didn't think anybody was phoning it in. My favorite character to watch actually was Julia Roberts. I thought she had the most interesting character arc, dealing with how you would handle this situation with a guy holding your host hostage, and the decision she takes is to keep filming. She wants the lighting on the gunman to be good, and she wants the camera man to get good angles while this drastic situation is going down. It offers some creative comedy relief, but it works because that's who this character is.
I didn't find too many reveals as surprising, or shocking, but I did think that as the film went on you get to look at all these characters in different lights. Clooney's character ranges from over confident, to wet my pants coward, to sympathetic unintentional bad guy, and finally the redeemable reporter. Each character travels through circles of personalities which make these characters and the decisions they make even more real.
The only thing that I have issue with the characters, and this is very minor, are that sometimes they skip a step to get to an emotion. For instance, when the gun man first takes the stage and hold's Clooney hostage, Clooney's character experiences a panic attack, but a few seconds later he recovers to the point where he's cool as a cucumber again. These little steps to quicken the plot are noticeable, but not enough to really take me out of the film.
Another aspect of this film that I didn't particularly care for was the big reveal at what happened to the missing money. You saw it a mile away, and the scenes where the characters are coming to terms with who the "big bad" is you're just shaking your head at how obvious it was. And that's where the first missed opportunity comes in. This could have been a super personal story, but they tried to make this national, bigger than it needed to be, and because of that I felt it lost something important by the end.
The film also branches out to get the audience, and every day people's perspective on the hostage situation. While this does create an interesting commentary on how we react to television and threats, I did feel like I've seen this all before. Crowd doesn't believe it, they're stupid and make it out as a joke, and then something serious shocks them into the real world. This was definitely a wasted opportunity as this perspective was clearly a commentary on our social culture, and it didn't offer anything new to the conversation. Instead, it took us out of the hostage situation and made this film that should have been claustrophobic into something bigger than it should have been. In fact, there are scenes where the, for lack of a better term, audience participates in the hostage situation, and the biggest mistake the film made was giving the audience a face. The scene would have been so much more powerful if George Clooney was interacting with a faceless mob on the internet.
With the exception of those minor nitpicks, I thought this film was solid. I'd recommend seeing this at either a matinee, rent it on DVD, or just wait until it's on cable. There's nothing I hate about this film, but the few things I don't agree with it are directorial decisions. It's not a film that you'll be dying to see again within the year, but for what it brings up and tries to accomplish is enough to at least check it out.
B-
