Bank-heist tale cashes in on actresses' talent
A rich corporate wife (Diane Keaton), a struggling single mom (Queen Latifah) and a loopy party girl (Katie Holmes) join forces and plan to rob a bank.
As plots go, this one doesn't automatically bring the phrase "Oscar material" to mind.
Yet several elements come together to save "Mad Money" from being as dumb and superficial a movie as its outlandish plot might suggest.
Writers Glenn Gers and John Mister have crafted intelligent twists to this improbable tale.
Director Callie Khouri, who won a 1991 Oscar for writing "Thelma & Louise," keeps true to this movie's overall tone of comedy. Yet she also manages to preserve the tension-building essential to any bank-heist movie. That's a deft balance.
She and the writers do that by employing a series of forward flashes. As the story unfolds of how the three women meet while working at the Federal Reserve Bank and concoct a plan to rob it, the writers and director periodically interrupt it with interviews held at some point in the future.
We can tell it's the future because the characters are sitting in an interrogation room, spilling information to the police on just how the robbery came to take place.
This gives us an appropriate sense of foreboding and builds a little gravitas into this caper comedy.
Keaton and Holmes bring a delightful sense of wackiness to their characters, though they're limited by the fact that the script paints these characters as pretty one-dimensional.
Keaton plays Bridget Cardigan, who is motivated mostly by a craving for cash, and Holmes plays the youthful Jackie, who just wants to have fun and see the world.
Keaton does give Bridget great leadership quality, though, and we can fully believe her capable of masterminding the scheme to "rescue" the worn-out cash slated to be destroyed at the Federal Reserve Bank.
The writers give the character of Nina, the single mom, a little more depth, and Queen Latifah explores that depth with just enough restraint. Nina knows that she faces a consequence more dire than the other two because, if the three of them end up going to jail, she will lose her children.
Roger R. Cross, who plays Barry, the bank security guard who adores Nina from afar, and then closer up, also nicely underplays his character.
The competent structural and acting touches give this movie some polish, but at its core, it's simply a bank-heist caper comedy. It's fun, but it doesn't aspire to anything like character development, or even explaining why women with basically decent lives would turn criminal and risk so much on a long-shot gambit.
So don't expect too much beyond an entertaining story with a sprinkle of cleverness here and there.
"Mad Money"
Rating: 2 stars
Opens: tonight
Starring:
Diane Keaton as Bridget Cardigan
Queen Latifah as Nina Brewster
Katie Holmes as Jackie Truman
Ted Danson as Don Cardigan
Roger R. Cross as Barry
Written by Glenn Gers and John Mister. Produced by James Acheson and Jay Cohen. Directed by Callie Khouri. A Big City Pictures and Overture Films release. Rated PG-13 (sexual situations, drug references). Running time: 104 minutes.