Post by Doomsday on Oct 22, 2019 13:53:48 GMT -5
The Laundromat
Right off the bat it's obvious that The Laundromat, a Steven Soderbergh/Netflix team-up, is trying its best to be 2019's The Big Short or Wolf of Wall Street. It comes off as a punchy, topical and quick-whitted movie that wants to send a clear message to those rich fat cats at the top of the financial food chain and tries its damndest to do so. Instead it's so desperately trying to be clever and mimic those other, much more successful and entertaining films that it forgets that it's also supposed to be a movie that we're meant to follow.
The movie starts off strong; Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep and her husband James Cromwell are on a tourist boat which is knocked over by a rogue wave and many on board, including Cromwell, drown. Streep gets screwed in the insurance settlement as the owners of the boating company (Robert Patrick and David Schwimmer) got scammed by the company that bought out their insurance policy. Streep then goes on the hunt for those responsible and her search takes us through other stories involving shell companies and shadow corporations all narrated by the owners of the firm that houses them all, Mossack and Fonseca (Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas). These characters are both the vehicles of exposition while they also attempt to be the guys who put everything in layman's terms. Remember how it was funny when Selena Gomez told everyone how synthetic CDOs worked in The Big Short? Or when Leo would take a break from banging everyone in Wolf of Wall Street and help you follow along? The Laundromat tries to have Oldman and Banderas play those characters similarly but with very mixed results. Oldman's accent is almost irritating and he seems like he's trying to have a good time but isn't. They try to walk us through some stories that are in no way connected in trying to tell us how shell corporations screw the little guy while benefitting all the millionaires. A noble intention and like I said it starts off pretty strong before ending with such a whimper that they shoehorn Meryl Streep at the very end and summarize the whole point of the movie. It's as though they were 3/4's of the way through filming and suddenly realized 'uh oh, this is a disaster, how do we fix this?' The end result is a movie that's so uneven and anticlimactic that you forget what they're trying to tell you because you're just waiting for something to happen.
The Laundromat isn't a bad movie in that it's incompetent, it's just an enormous missed opportunity. It had all the key ingredients, a noteworthy director, a big cast of great talent and a story that could have grabbed peoples' attention. Unfortunately they moved forward on a script that needed 3 or 4 more rounds of rewrites and the end result is a movie that's choppy at its best and unintelligible at its worst.
C so says Doomsday
Right off the bat it's obvious that The Laundromat, a Steven Soderbergh/Netflix team-up, is trying its best to be 2019's The Big Short or Wolf of Wall Street. It comes off as a punchy, topical and quick-whitted movie that wants to send a clear message to those rich fat cats at the top of the financial food chain and tries its damndest to do so. Instead it's so desperately trying to be clever and mimic those other, much more successful and entertaining films that it forgets that it's also supposed to be a movie that we're meant to follow.
The movie starts off strong; Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep and her husband James Cromwell are on a tourist boat which is knocked over by a rogue wave and many on board, including Cromwell, drown. Streep gets screwed in the insurance settlement as the owners of the boating company (Robert Patrick and David Schwimmer) got scammed by the company that bought out their insurance policy. Streep then goes on the hunt for those responsible and her search takes us through other stories involving shell companies and shadow corporations all narrated by the owners of the firm that houses them all, Mossack and Fonseca (Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas). These characters are both the vehicles of exposition while they also attempt to be the guys who put everything in layman's terms. Remember how it was funny when Selena Gomez told everyone how synthetic CDOs worked in The Big Short? Or when Leo would take a break from banging everyone in Wolf of Wall Street and help you follow along? The Laundromat tries to have Oldman and Banderas play those characters similarly but with very mixed results. Oldman's accent is almost irritating and he seems like he's trying to have a good time but isn't. They try to walk us through some stories that are in no way connected in trying to tell us how shell corporations screw the little guy while benefitting all the millionaires. A noble intention and like I said it starts off pretty strong before ending with such a whimper that they shoehorn Meryl Streep at the very end and summarize the whole point of the movie. It's as though they were 3/4's of the way through filming and suddenly realized 'uh oh, this is a disaster, how do we fix this?' The end result is a movie that's so uneven and anticlimactic that you forget what they're trying to tell you because you're just waiting for something to happen.
The Laundromat isn't a bad movie in that it's incompetent, it's just an enormous missed opportunity. It had all the key ingredients, a noteworthy director, a big cast of great talent and a story that could have grabbed peoples' attention. Unfortunately they moved forward on a script that needed 3 or 4 more rounds of rewrites and the end result is a movie that's choppy at its best and unintelligible at its worst.
C so says Doomsday
