Showing that “Mel Gibson with a puppet strapped to his hand” was only the first step in Jodie Foster’s journey into cinematic subtlety, we’ve got the first trailer for the director’s new film, Money Monster, in which an angry blue-collar worker (Unbroken’s Jack O’Connell, playing the handsome, white, Christian kind of terrorist) points a gun at the late-2000s banking crisis and tries to make it go away. More specifically, he targets a Jim Cramer-esque financial huckster (George Clooney, getting to show off his shit-eating grin and sincere, soulful glower in roughly equal parts) and his producer (Julia Roberts, present), holding them hostage and demanding they face the consequences of a bad stock tip that left his family broke.
But, as the Bruce Springsteen song on the trailer soundtrack lets us know, there are bigger villains out there than a mere armed lunatic with a poor-but-honest haircut and a tragic backstory. And so, it looks like Clooney and O’Connell—after the observance of the requisite hostage tropes, hallowed from similar past films like Dog Day Afternoon and Airheads—will be teaming up to expose the real bad guys: the Wall Street fat cats (represented by The Wire’s Dominic West, catting fatly) who strapped a suicide vest called “the banking crisis” around the helpless middle-class torso of the American Dream and merrily set it off.