Money Monster is a film that will be released at the time when the blockbuster summer season will begin, and it is directed by Jodie Foster and reunites George Clooney and Julia Roberts. Clooney plays a host of a TV show who is taken hostage while still on the air, and Roberts is the producer attempting to handle the situation as best as she can. It is a set-up for a decent dramatic film, and this is what is known about Money Monster, release date, and whether or not this film can really succeed.
There is already a trailer for the film that can be seen below, and it shows that there is a hostage situation with Julia Roberts asking that anyone who can leave should leave. Then the trailer flashes the "2 Hours Earlier" text, and this is a very common and really overused opening to a modern-day suspense movie.
From there, Clooney's character of Lee Gates is introduced as some financial commentator similar to that of Jim Cramer on CNBC. Robert's character, Patty Fenn, keeps Clooney's show going, but they have creative differences as to how it should be run.
During the filming of a fateful episode, a man named Kyle Budwell (Jack O'Connell, star of last year's Unbroken) bursts onto the set with a gun and exploding vest. Budwell puts the jacket on Gates, claiming that he can explode it if his thumb leaves a detonator that he holds in his hand. Budwell then makes some demands for the corporate rich people that apparently took his own finances.
Even though it looks like this film feels very suspenseful, and Jodie Foster has some directing experience, it is not likely that this film will really succeed. The issue is that this trailer feels like a by-the-numbers hostage situation, which has been done many times before in movies and television. Even the beginning of the trailer with the "2 Hours Earlier" is an overdone device made to get the audience's attention.
The trailer might actually suggest the Gates and Budwell begin to work together in order to find out the true villain of this hostage situation, and this kind of plot twist has also been done before. There is even footage on the trailer showing that Gates and Budwell leave the TV set and are followed by many police officers. Not only is this kind of a spoiler of the film, but this type of plot twist has been done before as Stockholm Syndrome gets another exploration on screen.
In short, it doesn't look like Money Monster is going to offer audiences anything new to see. Films and television are full of plotlines about how the 1 percent are stealing from the other 99, and it looks like the screenplay for Money Monster is just another in an unplanned series of films with the same theme.
However, Clooney and Roberts have done films that are repetitions of the same plotline, like they did in the remake of Ocean's 11. There is no reason that good writing, acting, and dialogue might make Money Monster a more than decent edge-of-the-seat thriller when it hits theaters on May 13, 2016, but the message is one that will open no one's eyes.
