Money Monster

As a plain suspenseful thriller this new film by Jodie Foster works quite well. Set in a TV studio where Lee Gates (George Clooney) has a money tips show, it all turns to something else when a disenchanted punter who has lost all his money when one of Lee’s recommendations melted down has come in to seek justice complete with a belt full of explosives.  This goes onto Lee and the thriller begins.  Given a sloppy security and police reaction, the show’s producer Patti, (Julia Roberts) soon realizes she is going to have to produce her way out of this if her host is to be saved.  As Kyle (Jack O’Connell) rants and threatens, we see her tying up the loose ends and finding out what really happened thanks to a couple of leads and the speed and ubiquity of modern technology.  So far so good. Now the problem is that Foster wants to convey the whole message of the big bad money markets and the scurrilous people who work in them creaming off profits illegally.  And here it gets glossy and all a little bit too superficial.  There is plenty of artistic license and while some of the shallowness can be put down to the media’s demands for a simple story, this political side runs out of steam.  Generally competent performances and a swift pace, you will be entertained but not wowed.

★★★+

Unbroken

Angelina Jolie’s big budget debut is based on an amazing true story of Loiue Zamperini, a teenage Olympic athlete who later goes to war against Japan in the air force.  Shot down and adrift he and a mate survive on a liferaft before he is picked up by the Japanese and put in a concentration camp.  There, he refuses to be broken which arouses the ire of the young Japanese soldier who is in charge.  Theirs is a battle which continues to another camp and shows just how cruel the Japanese torture was.  Zamperini survives to tell the story and now Jolie has translated it to the big screen.  She seems a little overwhelmed by it all and makes a self-conscious and rather leaden story that someone like Clint Eastwood would have probably found the way to lighten with the odd touch.  Here the scenes are all epic, which works for some of the air battle scenes early on but even by the raft time we are starting to tire and the camp scenes are heavy with symbolism (the scenes where inmates have to bash our hero and when he is obliged to lift a beam and hold it high as if he formed part of a cross are all a bit over the top).

There are some good scenes and Jack O’Connell and the cast do a good enough job, but it never seems to be getting near the end and the anti-Japanese stance, however justified it might be only starts to irritate.

★★+