A splendid Christopher Plummer steps in to save 'All the Money in the World'

“All the Money in the World” - ★ ★ ★ ½

Observe Christopher Plummer's billionaire J. Paul Getty and you'll witness a stunning piece of inspired craftsmanship, a performance every bit as confident, forceful and nuanced as if the actor rehearsed the role for six months instead of the less-than six weeks he actually had to save Ridley Scott's fact-based drama “All the Money in the World.”

As most film fans already know, the movie had been completed with Kevin Spacey playing the oil tycoon. When sexual harassment allegations against him threw the production into a potential box office death spiral, Scott asked the 88-year-old Plummer to replace Spacey in all of his 22 scenes.

At a reported cost of $10 million, the reshoots involved working 18-hour days with reassembled cast members, lots of re-edits, plus revamping the marketing campaign prominently featuring Spacey in prosthetics and heavy makeup, all in a mad scramble to hit the movie's original Dec. 22 opening date. (It now opens Christmas Day.)

This film might appear to be a standard-issue kidnapping thriller. But that quickly becomes genre camouflage for an intense, pensive meditation on the high price that great wealth can extract from your soul.

Plummer plays Getty as a real Charles Foster Kane, a larger-than-life figure riding a fleet vehicle driven by overt visual and verbal “Citizen Kane” references.

But Plummer's wealthiest man in history seems less informed by Charles Kane than by Charles Dickens' Ebenezer Scrooge, whom Plummer played to miserly perfection in the recent biographic fantasy “The Man Who Invented Christmas.”

“All the Money in the World” opens with what could be a shimmering, black-and-white homage to Federico Fellini films as Getty's teenage grandson John Paul Getty III (Charlie Plummer, no relation to Christopher) gets abducted on the streets of Italy by Red Brigade gangsters in 1973. They demand $17 million for his release.

His frantic mother, Gail (Michelle Williams, the story's emotional center, sounding vaguely like Katharine Hepburn), married Getty's ne'er-do-well, drug-addicted son (Andrew Buchan). But she possesses none of her father-in-law's financial resources. She begs Getty to pay the ransom and save his grandson.

But $17 million? It's an offer the godfather of capitalism can refuse. And does.

Getty relies on a hired gun, a former CIA operative named Fletcher Chace (Mark Walhberg) to protect his interests.

But Chace's interests gravitate toward the resilient Gail, who has given up all money claims in exchange for sole custody of her son, and now fights to keep him alive.

As months tick by, the once-patient kidnappers keep cutting deals (down to $4 million) and decide to start cutting other things, starting with John Paul Getty III's right ear. (This plays like Dustin Hoffman's no-anesthetic, tooth-drilling scenes in “Marathon Man.”) One kidnapper (Romain Duris) befriends the teen, and tries to shield him from harm.

Although David Scarpa's taut screenplay comes from John Pearson's 1995 book “Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortune and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty,” this drama is billed as “inspired by real events,” meaning that even greater liberties have been taken with the facts than movies merely “based on real events.”

That explains a ridiculous money-exchange scene that hinges on a kidnapper's accuracy with a slingshot and the too-tidy climax.

“No more games!” a miffed gangster boss shouts.

But this movie is a game of sorts, a crackling chess game with Plummer as the king, Williams as the queen, Wahlberg as the knight, young Plummer as the pawn, Duris as the bishop and Ridley Scott, now 80, as the cinematic supreme chess master.

<b>Starring:</b> Michelle Williams, Christopher Plummer, Mark Wahlberg, Charlie Plummer, Romain Duris

<b>Directed by:</b> Ridley Scott

<b>Other:</b> A TriStar Pictures release. Rated R for language, drug use and violence. 132 minutes