Money Monster (2016)

MONEY MONSTER  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jodie Foster
    George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jack O'Connell,
    Dominic West, Caitriona Balfe, Giancarlo Esposito
A good escapist thriller about what happens when a guy with a gun and a bomb hijacks a television show hosted by an investment hustler played by George Clooney. It seems the bomber  sank his life savings  - his mother's entire estate - in a stock Clooney's character talked up, and when it tanked, he was wiped out. Now he's on a very public suicide mission to get some answers and get even, not just for himself, but for everybody else who got ripped off when he did. It'd help here if the bomber, played by Jack O'Connell, didn't look quite so much like a guy who might be a suicide bomber, and the whole thing seems a little far-fetched, but who knows? When so much of our infotainment (there's a horrible word)  is designed to divide and provoke, you can see how a lot of people could be pissed off by something like this. And it's not hard to imagine one of them being crazy enough to do something about it. Foster manages the escalating tension with skill and efficiency, while Clooney brings his self-mocking star power to a character who's not quite as smart as he'd like people to think he is, and much too vain to admit it. Throw this in with "The Wolf of Wall Street" and "The Big Short", and you've got a de facto trilogy: three dramatized takes on a real-world financial system that's become more and more suspect, the suspicion being that the crooks at the top are rigging the game, stacking the deck in their favor, and scamming the rest of us.