Following the adventures and struggles of Lee Gates, an arrogant and rude TV financial program host, who follows and broadcasts on his live show the last updates of sticks and shares, but once upon taken as hostages with his producer live by a businessman, who has lost all his money.
No matter how many times Jack O'Connell waves his gun in the air and threatens to detonate the place with a bomb, you never truly believe anyone's life is in danger.
The yammer and righteousness defeat Clooney and even Julia Roberts, stuck at a console twitching knobs and micromanaging frowns as the producer trying to hold the show together.
Money Monster occasionally veers deep into the weeds of financial jargon -- quantitative analytics, dark pools, high-frequency trading -- but the filmmakers wisely opt to embrace the broad audience appeal of a frenetic conspiracy thriller.
With all the ranting about a "rigged" financial system, the movie certainly captures the zeitgeist, but it' so overloaded with action-movie tropes and tech-based plot contrivances that it begins to feel a little silly.
A bewilderingly facile and preposterously plotted misfire that offers few pleasures as either a star-driven thriller or a big-screen indictment of the forces that devastated global bank accounts.
The pieces would seem to be in place, but ... "Money Monster" is a stodgy, moribund plodder loaded with stock characters that wouldn't have felt edgy in 1983 and has about the same contemporary urgency as your average late-night rerun of "CSI: NY."
