Money Monster review: not so much a hot tip, more a solid investment

Following its recent premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, more than a few critics suggested that Jodie Foster’s snappy, unpretentious thriller seemed to have crawled unaltered from the 1990s. There’s something in that. The picture has a flat, unseasoned look to it that suggests Clintonian sophistry and the first Britney Spears LP.

The hostage-taker-as-celebrity conceit points back further to films such as Dog Day Afternoon and The King of Comedy. So, there’s nothing hugely original about Money Monster. It is, however, encouraging to experience a film that tells its story with such admirable economy. Films featuring stars this huge rarely wind down with so little fuss.

George Clooney plays a TV stock tipster very much in the style of Jim Cramer from CNBC. You know the sort of thing: funny hats, crazy graphics, endless catchphrases. It seems that, some months earlier, he recommended a stock that has now bombed catastrophically. Poor old Kyle Budwell (Jack O’Connell), a working-class Joe, lost his shirt on the deal and is coming to extract very public revenge. He bursts into the studio and reveals the explosives strapped around his midriff. Unless some large amount of money is put his way, he will blow George’s lovely head off.

The film makes much of the way the market has turned investments into mysterious electronic quanta whose behaviour is defined solely in terms of their relationship to other units in the virtual network. That’s to say: nobody knows how this stuff works. The picture then slightly undermines its own argument by focusing on a scam that is just that bit too easy to understand. If you can explain it this simply then it would surely never come off.

For all that, thanks to strong turns from the leads – O’Connell is touching as the misguided rube; Dominic West is a believable Master of the Universe; Julia Roberts is steady as Clooney’s producer – the film develops into a well-balanced, impressively tense chamber piece. It’s never wholly believable, but it’s great fun throughout.