If nothing else, the clumsy Australian financial thriller The Bank scores points for anticipating the corporate skullduggery that led to the recent flurry of accounting scandals and collapsing markets, leaving a bill paid mostly by small investors and low-level employees. Starting with the premise that the stock-market game is rigged and the players are unscrupulous, writer-director Robert Connolly virtually pens the script for things to come, only he tacks on a more optimistic ending. Like Wall Street, its most obvious '80s antecedent, the film seems plugged into the moment in a way that's energizing without being convincing; both films prove that it's possible to have a finger on the pulse and still make a bad movie. Remove the techno-thriller silliness from The Bank and it could screen at a pep rally before an IMF protest, sounding a righteous battle cry against the mirthless barons perched in sleek, high-rise conference rooms. But such broad politicking doesn't always mingle smoothly with the vagaries of fiction, mainly because the characters are strapped to a larger agenda that saps them of their humanity. Connolly takes his time dividing the camps into "good guys" and "bad guys," but there's no doubt from the beginning where he places Anthony LaPaglia, a cigar-chomping monster who compares himself to God, only "with a better suit." Faced with pressure from the Centabank board to increase profit margins, LaPaglia takes a meeting with David Wenham, a mathematics wizard whose mastery of chaos theory and fractal geometry has led him to create a system that can predict stock-market fluctuations. Though he initially laughs off Wenham's altruistic intent, LaPaglia seizes the chance to co-opt his program for the cause of evil, but he's careful to make certain that the new hire doesn't undermine his plans. In a parallel, much weaker subplot, two parents (Steve Rodgers and Mandy McElhinney) try to sue Centabank for its roundabout involvement in the death of their son, who drowned improbably after the bank foreclosed on their houseboat business. (In a particularly ham-fisted touch, the boy is found dead with a court summons stuffed in his jacket.) The Bank dips its toes into mathematical theory—the psychedelic computer graphics for Wenham's program look like a Fruitopia commercial—but it doesn't stray far from the Wall Street template, right down to a love interest (Sibylla Budd) who may or may not be a company spy. As with Michael Douglas in the earlier film, LaPaglia brings the hero into a world of greed and compromised values, but his fork-tongued monologues aren't remotely seductive, which makes the ending a foregone conclusion. The only true moral dilemma in the film arrives when the houseboat subplot finally comes into play, but Connolly slides out of it at the last possible moment. The Bank may get the realities of the market right, but in the end it trades idealism for fantasy.