Review: All The Money In The World

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures.

Ridley Scott's "All the Money in the World" is, mostly without intention, one of the most prescient films of the year and one that spells out in big letters what 2017 was all about. The picture originally starred Kevin Spacey as J. Paul Getty, but his scenes were reshot after the Hollywood sex abuse scandal engulfed the actor, who was replaced by Christopher Plummer. Also, Getty acts as a very suitable stand-in for another of the year's biggest societal themes - how the rich and powerful play games with the lives of others.

The picture follows the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III (Charlie Plummer) and the lengths to which his grandfather refused to pay his kidnappers, eventually at the expense of the boy. The picture sets up J. Paul Getty as a notorious Scrooge type who is known for being, at that time, the richest man in the world, although he managed to get out of paying taxes and refused to lend a hand to his own family members.

In the film's early scenes, bad blood is established between Getty and his heir's mother, Gail Harris (Michelle Williams), after the latter divorces the billionaire's no-good drug addict son and refuses to take his money, opting only to keep sole custody of the kids. Clearly, Getty sees anything relating to his family - including Harris' children - as his property and goes out of his way to make her life miserable after the kidnapping takes place. Another character in the film calls Getty a "son of a bitch" and I believe he is being generous.

Mark Wahlberg pops up as a man known as J. Fletcher Chase, a former CIA operative who works on security detail for Getty. He is sent to Rome to find out who took Getty's heir (police believe it was the Red Brigade), but Chase originally thinks that the heir staged his own kidnapping. This mistaken belief is paid at the heir's expense.

"All the Money in the World" is an entertaining hostage drama and period piece. Plummer is a great actor, but also a very likable one - so, it's jarring to see him play such a wretched human being. Williams and Wahlberg are good as well, even if their characters are merely the archetypes of the worried mother and inspector.

The most interesting relationship in the film is between the kidnapped boy and one of his captors, a man named Cinquanta (Romain Duris), who clearly wants to get paid for his role in the kidnapping, but also has enough of a conscience to want to see the boy make it through alive. Considering how quickly much of this film was reshot - following Spacey's fall in the limelight - "All in the Money in the World" is a swiftly paced and enjoyable thriller. Scott has made better crime dramas and thrillers ("American Gangster" and "Thelma and Louise," for instance), but this is a well-made - and strangely timely - film for our age of unease.