Money Monster

The flamboyant host of a TV financial advice program (George Clooney) and his producer (Julia Roberts) are taken hostage on the air by a bomb-brandishing working-class schlub who lost his life savings (Jack O’Connell). Director Jodie Foster grapples reasonably well, probably better than could be expected, with the uneasy mix of comedy and menace in Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore and Jim Kouf’s script. But in the end, neither she nor the cast can overcome the script’s basic problems: (1) the ending is anticlimactic and unsatisfying; (2) O’Connell’s character is a nitwit, the perfect illustration of that old saying about a fool and his money; and (3) there’s something a little too smarmy about a Hollywood studio turning out a screw-Wall-Street movie for the purpose of increasing the value of its own stock. J.L.