Mad Money

As I was getting my things gathered to leave the theater, I overheard a woman a couple rows behind me sum up her feelings on Mad Money as "It wasn't a movie I needed to see, but I didn't mind watching it". That pretty much nails it for me too. Mad Money is a rainy day movie - a little time waster of a film that doesn't do anything special, but never offends in any way. Much of the film's appeal relies on the three lead actresses, who attack the material head on and with much more liveliness than it probably deserves. Director Callie Khouri (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood) delivers plenty of good feelings and energy, but none of the tension that a caper comedy needs.

The story kicks off when pampered housewife Bridget Cardigan (Diane Keaton) is forced to take a job so that her husband, Don (Ted Danson), and her can keep their home. Don's been laid off for over a year, and a new job just doesn't seem to be in his future. Since Bridget has been out of the workforce for so long, the only job she can get is a janitorial position at a Federal building. During her training session, she discovers a room where old money is destroyed and shredded. She thinks its wrong that the government destroys so much money every day, and since no one apparently wants it, she figures why not "recycle" the money set to be destroyed? She devises a plan to secretly sneak money out of the building, but she'll need some cohorts to pull it off. After scanning her fellow employees for possible candidates, she eventually settles on straight-talking single mother Nina Brewster (Queen Latifah) and the slightly ditzy Jackie (Katie Holmes). The plan is put into action, and goes off without a hitch. But, as with any scheme, it threatens to break apart as more people become involved, and personal feelings begin to get in the way.

Mad Money wants to be a light, fluffy comic fantasy of female empowerment. In order to keep the audience on the side of these three women who are stealing from the government, the movie tries bend over backwards to make the lead characters sympathetic and likeable. The problem is, the movie doesn't quite dig deep enough. Keaton's Bridget seems spoiled and materialistic, since she's doing this simply so she can continue to enjoy her fairly lavish lifestyle. Katie Holmes' character isn't developed nearly enough, since she exists mainly to be the ditzy comic relief. She lives in a trailer park and likes to dance to music on her headphones, but that's pretty much all we learn about her. The closest the movie comes to a truly sympathetic character is in Latifah's portrayal of Nina, a lower class single mother who is trying to put her gifted children into a better school. She not only acts as the moral center for most of the film, she seems to make the most sense as well. The characters may not exactly be deep, but the three actresses have good chemistry together, and their performances are what mainly attach us to the women they're playing. The screenplay by Glenn Gers (Fracture) often opts for being cute and likeable over actually being funny, but there are a couple scattered laughs to its credit, such as when Latifah's character receives a note from her son's school about a list of weapons that are not allowed on school grounds, and she wonders out loud what weapons are allowed.

While the movie creates an overall breezy tone, what it can't create is any sort of sense that maybe, possibly things will go bad. This is surprising, since the movie actually opens late in the story, with the characters trying to destroy the money, and the Feds closing in. It then flashes back to when it all began. Despite the fact that we know where the story is headed, we never get a sense of how it got to that point. The subplot of the possibility of the scheme being uncovered is haphazardly introduced late in the film, and seems to come out of nowhere. For a majority of its running time, the girls don't even come close to getting caught, discovered, or even seem to have second thoughts. The movie makes robbing a Federal building seem to be about as effortless as your morning routine. The fact that the characters constantly stress how heavily monitored and seemingly impossible it is to rob the building makes it all the more laughable, and makes it hard to swallow that no one had come up with Keaton's plan to get the money out of the building years ago. Even when the scheme does become threatened to fall apart, the movie seems to be trying to reassure us everything will be okay constantly. The overly light and fluffy tone the film carries pretty much assures us that these girls won't be facing the most obvious and logical outcome to their crime.

Mad Money has a lot of talent behind it, more than it probably deserved. The talent isn't enough to make the film come out a winner, but it does turn it into passable entertainment if you're not interested in anything else playing and there's nothing better to do. Not exactly the most glowing of endorsements, I know, but that's just the kind of movie it is. It plays it completely safe, and at least comes across as likeable escapism. Calling it anything more than that would be giving it too much credit.

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