The American economy has
seemed iffy for a while, but that doesn't come out at the movies. This decade's
films have rarely acknowledged the facts of living in the aftermath of the
irrational exuberance of the '90s. To be fair, there were all those
cyber-terrorists and other 21st-century perils to dispatch, but given that most
of us have had to worry more about making the mortgage or paying tuition or
learning to eat generic cornflakes than getting blown up, the relative blind
eye mainstream movies have turned to money matters has been a little weird.
So Mad Money, directed by Thelma
& Louise
screenwriter Callie Khouri, at least deserves some credit for talking about the
elephant in the room. A remake of the British TV movie Hot Money, it takes place in a
heartland America where everyone is feeling the pinch of the slump, beginning
with once-wealthy housewife Diane Keaton and husband Ted Danson, who wind up deep
in debt a year into Danson's unemployment. Forced to, gulp, work, Keaton takes a job
at the Kansas City Federal Reserve, where she eventually ropes a pair of new
down-market friends, Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes, into stealing stacks of
money earmarked for destruction.
The scheme works for a
while. Sadly, the movie never does. As a heist film, it relies on the trio of
felonious females besting a system that seems laughably easy to outwit. As a
comedy, it relies on Keaton and Latifah playing the same characters they always
play, and Holmes overcompensating by switching into bug-eyed manic-comedienne
mode. Her performance is part Lucille Ball, part overcaffeinated chicken, and
it deserves some credit for daring, but none for execution. And as a morality
tale, the film has no morals to share. Money, it seems, could and should solve
everyone's problems. And taking it should be no problem at all. That might work
if there was a hint of wit to back up the cynicism, but Khouri directs as if
simply getting through a scene was work enough. It's a thoroughly uninspired
movie. Maybe "impoverished" is the better word.