'Mad Money' comes up short as female empowerment movie
The 1980 comedy "How to Beat the High Cost of Living," starred Susan Saint James, Jane Curtin and Jessica Lange as friends who scheme to steal cash from a giant money ball at the mall.
"Mad Money" plays like a rip-off, though it features a more motley trio of thieves: Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes, who scheme to steal cash from the Federal Reserve Bank where they work. While that earlier film wasn't exactly a cinematic classic, it had its moments of appealingly silly energy; in going for that same sort of screwball vibe, "Mad Money" strains desperately for laughs.
And for a female empowerment movie, this one's pretty weak. Truly, it's hard to believe it comes from director Callie Khouri, who won an Oscar for writing the ultimate female empowerment movie, "Thelma & Louise."
Keaton's Bridget Cardigan is an upper-middle-class wife and mother whose husband (Ted Danson) gets downsized out of his job, leaving the couple $286,000 in debt. Having been out of the work force for decades and totally lacking in useful skills, she's forced her to take a job as a janitor at the Fed.
Latifah co-stars as Nina, a single mother of two boys whose function at the Kansas City bank is to shred the bills that get too worn out. And Holmes' Jackie, who carts the cash from one place to another, is young, wildly ditzy and lives in a trailer with her doofus husband (Adam Rothenberg).
That it's nearly impossible to imagine how the sheltered, pampered Bridget could come up with such a devious, complex plan — then rope two complete strangers into it — isn't just a nagging plot point. It's a fundamental flaw. (Her idea: Switch the locks on the money carts, stuff the cash that's about to be destroyed into a trash bin, then hide it in their panties and walk right out the front door. It's not theft, Bridget reasons: "It's more like recycling.")
Except for Latifah's character, who's barely scraping by and eagerly seeks a better life for her sons, it's tough to muster much sympathy for any of them. Then the script forces her into a half-baked romance with one of the bank's security guards (Roger Cross), who discovers their crime but agrees to protect them for a piece of the action, and to spend time with Nina.
There isn't even any suspense in wondering whether their continued greed will get them into trouble — we know from the outset that the women get caught because the whole story is told in flashback, with all the players involved frantically trying to destroy the evidence.
"Ocean's Three," it ain't.
