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film review

In this image released by Sony Pictures, Jack O'Connell, left, and George Clooney appear in a scene from "Money Monster."Atsushi Nishijima/The Associated Press

Since Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in 2008, Hollywood has discovered there are reliable returns to be made on Wall Street thrillers that expose the fraud and vilify the greed. It's a contemporary version of the heist movie: audiences get the paradoxical pleasure of dastardly crime and righteous indignation.

Now Money Monster cleverly expands the genre simply by changing the focus from the wolves of Wall Street to one of the lambs – a small investor who has staked all his savings on one stock pick and lost. Desperately seeking explanations as to how an investment company could lose $800-million in evaluation overnight because of a glitch in a financial algorithm, one Kyle Budwell sneaks onto the set of a hyped-up TV business show and takes its host, the campy stock picker Lee Gates, hostage.

If the naive and panicked Kyle, played by the soulful British actor Jack O'Connell, has compounded one bad choice with another, Money Monster's producers have certainly made the right ones. The film – tightly directed by Jodie Foster and marking a return to form for both George Clooney as the glib Jim Cramer-like Gates and Julia Roberts as his steady producer – could not be more perfectly timed.

Out there in the real world, Donald Trump plays to the worst instincts of the economically battered white working-class while Bernie Sanders lectures about income inequality; on screen, Kyle finally gets Lee's full attention not with his gun and vest of explosives but with the information that he makes $14 an hour delivering packages in a city where he can't afford to support an expected child. In a different year, Money Monster might just be another solidly entertaining thriller with an admirable script; in 2016, it feels like the movie of the moment.

The standoff between the two men, all of which is being broadcast live to an increasingly titillated public, is the main action here in a screenplay by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore and Jim Kouf that is at its trickiest when it foreshadows possible solutions only to continually dodge them.

But Money Monster also offers a satire of celebrity and social-media culture in which the darkest moments are among both the film's and Clooney's best as Gates, forced into direct contact with his audience in entirely new ways, faces the limits of his own popularity.

This is also something of a workplace comedy, with Roberts's cool-headed producer playing straight woman to Clooney's preening host in roles that call on both actors' comfortably familiar star qualities; hers to make common sense look charming; his to make self-satisfaction seem amusing.

Meanwhile, Foster, recovering nicely from her last directorial outing in the surprisingly unfunny The Beaver, proves her smarts by managing to balance these different strands of humour while keeping the action ticking along. Here, only a joke about a producer who has to try out an erectile ointment seems entirely out of place while, very wisely, Kyle's character, his desperation touchingly revealed by O'Connell, is never made the butt of any jokes.

Ultimately, as Clooney's increasingly introspective Gates talks Kyle down, the movie has to find a real villain, and does so in the mysteriously missing CEO of the tanking investment company. (An effectively anodyne Dominic West plays the baddie.) This last act, though, is the weakest, not because the action falters but rather because the unravelling of the fraud is simplistic enough that all of us who never could figure out what the hell was going on in The Big Short should be able to follow along here just fine.

The conclusion is quick and convenient and, for all that an audience has come to sympathize with the defrauded little guy, Foster can find no easy way to attach much emotion to Kyle's ultimate fate. This is, after all, an action movie in which Clooney and Roberts are the stars.

So, in the end, if Hollywood proves very happy to probe Wall Street's more dubious formulas, it knows better than to ditch its own.

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