Written by: Jamie Linden and Alan DiFiore & Jim Kouf (screenplay), Alan DiFiore & Jim Kouf (story)
Directed by: Jodie Foster
Starring: George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jack O'Connell, Dominic West, Giancarlo Esposito
Rated: R
Watch the trailer
Plot
Financial TV host Lee Gates is taken hostage when a viewer wants revenge due to bad advice.
Verdict
This starts off engrossing and clever. Why aren't television personalities held accountable for their words, and is their advice really unbiased? It's got a great start, but the ending trades a nuanced bad guy in for a definitive bad guy. Any pretense of nuance or commentary is completely abandoned, and this undercut the message of the movie. It's a good movie, but it could have been great.
Watch It.
Review
Clooney plays zany and bombastic television personality and financial advisor Lee Gates. Gates's show features him dressing up in costume with boxing gloves and white guy dancing to rap music. He's using this spectacle to dominate the opening of his show to diminish his previous stock tip failure. He's a talking head, and people follow his advice. When he gives bad advice he just shrugs his shoulders and attempts to misdirect. He affects lives and doesn't realize or care.
Lee Gates told his viewers Ibis stock was safer than a savings account. Of course he contests this when presented with the quote, but he said it and people took his advice as truth. Kyle (Jack O'Connell) wants to hold him accountable. It's a hint of to Falling Down (1993) where someone does what we all secretly want to do.
I hoped the movie could maintain the clever set up, but it can't. The antagonist gets a subtle introduction, and I wondered if the movie would use Kyle to humanize Lee Gates, the unlikable empty suit. The movie does that to a degree, but it never seems to be the point, and it could have been handled better.
The movie had the chance to present Gates with a dual personality. Bombastic on air, but a coward when the cameras aren't pointed his way. He seems devoted to continuing the charade that is his life, but the movie fails to delve into this too. Gates bluntly tells us he's a terrible person, but Clooney still seems to be playing too much of a hero, a little too much Clooney.
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| Entertaining movie, hampered by an uninspired ending. |
Julia Roberts plays Gates's producer and they work both sides as they try to placate Kyle. Roberts is able to communicate to Gates through an ear piece while she is in the production booth. Of course the cameras keep rolling throughout the situation.
The public is watching Gates's show as he's a hostage and I wasn't sure if they thought it was part of the show or real. No one seemed that concerned, some even laughing at the misfortune. The movie keys in on a few spectators, who are reintroduced much later.
Gates has a great sequence when he pleads to viewers for his life. I don't know if stock prices could be affected that quickly, but it's a great sequence, well directed.
An oft repeated phrase between Roberts and Clooney is "Sacagawea." It seems to mean shut up or stay on topic, but it's odd that the movie never really explains this. Only towards the end do we get definitive context clues. It was a missed opportunity to build the relationship between the two.
When Kyle's girlfriend appears, that's when the movie begins to lose its uniqueness. It starts to spiral as we get a greedy bad guy, an affair, and a ridiculous cop plan to shoot the hostage. We even have a cop crawling around in an air duct. First, air ducts aren't that large. Second, they were never designed to support two hundred extra pounds, the mounting points would snap. Third, the hostage taker would hear the cop bumping around.
This movie will stretch you suspension of disbelief as Gates and his attacker begin working together, but this didn't bother me. It's the fact that they are teaming up to take down the big bad. This movie didn't need that and it's as subtle as a flashing neon sign. Gates should be the bad guy in this, and he instead becomes a hero.
When the entertainment ends, everyone simply goes back to life. I liked the internet meme reference at the end. Despite the crimes committed, and the loss of life, culture just wants a funny picture. They just don't care, and that's the point this movie began to make before it abandoned it.
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