All the Money in the World (2017)

All the Money in the World (2017)

IMDB Rating 7.2/10 (as on 06.01.2.018)

R | 2h 12min | Biography, Crime, Drama

The story of the kidnapping of 16-year-old John Paul Getty III and the desperate attempt by his devoted mother to convince his billionaire grandfather Jean Paul Getty to pay the ransom.

Director: Ridley Scott

Writers: David Scarpa, John Pearson (based on the book by)

Stars: Michelle Williams, Christopher Plummer, Mark Wahlberg

IMDB link Here

Movie Rating  ★★★★☆  

 Raucous crime thriller banishes ghost of Kevin Spacey

Peter Bradshaw

The rich are different from you and me,” said F Scott Fitzgerald, to which Ernest Hemingway is famously alleged to have replied: “Yes, they have more money.” This film suggests they also have more fear of their own children – fear that they will parasitically suck away energy that should be devoted to building up riches and status; that they will fail to be worthy inheritors of it, or waste it, or cause it to be catastrophically mortgaged to their own pampered weakness. This fear is the driving force of Ridley Scott’s raucous pedal-to-the-metal thriller about the ageing and super-rich oil tycoon J Paul Getty, freely adapted by screenwriter David Scarpa from the 1995 page-turner Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortune and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J Paul Getty by veteran true-crime author John Pearson. It is directed by the 80-year-old Ridley Scott with gleeful energy and riotous attack. The old guy is always the most interesting character on screen, and that can hardly be an accident.

Christopher Plummer won a footnote in the history of the #MeToo campaign when Scott, disgusted by the allegations made against Kevin Spacey, removed Spacey from the role of Getty and replaced him with Plummer for last-second reshoots. Yet Plummer doesn’t look like a hasty replacement. He relishes and luxuriates in the role. It fits him perfectly. Getty is exactly right for Plummer’s talent for subversive glittery-eyed grandfatherly mischief, cut with a dash of misanthropic malice.

If I’d had to guess which cast member had been ’coptered into the film at short notice, I would have said Mark Wahlberg, who is Chase, Getty’s CIA-trained bodyguard and special ops guy. Everyone else is strenuously acting a role in period 1973 costume, accent and style. Wahlberg rocks up in a 2017 Kingsman suit and big glasses and more or less does his standard Boston cop-firefighter-regular-guy routine. Wahlberg’s non-acting acting is usually a plus. In this studied context, it’s a flaw.

For the purposes of showbusiness entertainment, this film hugely exaggerates the drink- and drug-related debility of Getty’s son John Paul II (Andrew Buchan) and ramps up the heroic importance of John Paul II’s ex-wife Gail, the victim’s mother, played with a kind of Katharine-Hepburn-lite accent by Michelle Williams. Gail earlier got custody of Getty’s grandkids in divorce proceedings, and the film cleverly hints that this was already a kind of kidnapping for the glowering old patriarch. And here it is Gail who must battle for the release of her son, in the face of the kidnappers’ ruthlessness and that of her former father-in-law. John Paul III is played by Charlie Plummer (no relation to Christopher).

All The Money in the World is not perfect; there is a touch of naivety and stereotyping in its depiction of the malign Italians with their one, redemptive nice-guy gangster. But with the help of Plummer’s tremendous villain-autocrat performance, Ridley Scott gives us a very entertaining parable about money and what it can’t buy.

 Read complete review at The Guardian

Twilight years? Ridley Scott will hear none of it — he has just made the paciest, most dynamic film ever made by an 80-year-old director. And as for Christopher Plummer, he delivers the best screen performance ever given by an actor who, a month before the film's debut, hadn't even been cast yet. These two old pros show what they're made of in All the Money in the World, a terrifically dexterous and detailed thriller about the Italian mob's 1973 kidnapping for ransom of the grandson of the world's richest man, John Paul Getty.

It may be that all the hoo-ha about Plummer replacing the disgraced Kevin Spacey at three minutes to midnight will actually increase public interest in a gripping film that otherwise had little advance profile and is unfortunately arriving on the scene too late to have been seen by critical awards groups. All the same, the Sony release provides a welcome alternative to the assorted franchise leviathans and long-ballyhooed specialty titles in release over the holidays.

It should be said upfront that Michelle Williams is also outstanding as the heart of the film, the mother of sweet-looking 16-year-old Jean Paul Getty III (appealing Charlie Plummer, no relation, also seen recently in Andrew Haigh's Lean on Pete).

It's a true-life yarn loaded with extremes, of wealth, personal eccentricities, grief, tension, daring, criminal means to political ends, maternal drive and luck, both bad and good. It is also a peek into a rarefied world where money knows no bounds and yet means everything.

The filmmakers take a risk by immediately interrupting the present-tense drama with flashbacks that both illuminate the sources of the Getty wealth (a scene showing the American oil man purchasing vast tracts of empty Saudi Arabian desert land in the late 1940s carries strong vibes of Lawrence of Arabia) and provide a look at family life chez JPG II, his wife Gail and their kids, including then-7-year-old JPG III, in burgeoning hippie-era San Francisco (where, very anachronistically, the film has it snowing at one point).

Scott moves the dramatic story along at a propulsive clip that never flags. The young captive is initially kept at an isolated farmhouse by a faction of the Red Brigade, a violent left-wing urban-terrorist organization that specialized in kidnapping for large ransoms. Little time is spent on the internal dynamics of the group, which almost at once seems fraught with tension. But the young Getty is mainly looked after by a combustible ruffian named Cinquanta (Romain Duris), who rather takes a liking to his charge.

Commanding the most screen time is Gail, whose distress and frustration are increasingly surpassed by moods that encourage her to leaps of boldness and imagination. The woman's background is never revealed; Williams affects what sounds like a very slight British accent, but what this protean performer most impressively does is to push Gail beyond the stock "I just want my son back!" type of hysterics to a point where the character seems to be oddly feeding on her anxiety in a way that makes her more creative and strategic.

Unavoidably, the scene in which the kidnappers, after four months of frustrated waiting, slice off young Getty's right ear in order to press the seriousness of their demands is central, and it's adroitly handled for requisite impact, but without sensationalism.

End credits acknowledge that some liberties have been taken with the historical record in the dramatization, but only specialists will likely take issue with them; there's a shoot-out with the radicals, young Getty is seen escaping at one point, and the manner of the exchange of money for the boy seems oddly illogical. Most egregiously, the old man's death is indicated as coinciding with his grandson's return, which was not the case at all.

The locations are terrific, as are all behind-the-scenes contributions by Scott regulars, including cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, production designer Arthur Max, costume designer Janty Yates and editor Claire Simpson. Daniel Pemberton provided the fine score.

 Read complete review at Hollywood reporter

Terrific Adult Entertainment

Scott Mendelson

After much fuzz over a last-minute crisis, Sony will distribute Tri Star and Scott Free's All the Money in the World into theaters on Christmas Day. Considering the subject matter, audience demographics and overall tone, dropping a movie like this on Christmas is almost a practical joke, but Ridley Scott wanted his shot at Oscar glory, dammit. The $50 million drama ($10m of that went to lightning-fast reshoots that cut Kevin Spacey out of the picture and put Christopher Plummer in his place) faces a crowded marketplace and an awards-season race that is quickly solidifying around the likes of The Post, Get Out, Lady Bird, The Shape of Water and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. And it'll face commercial competition from Star Wars, The Greatest Showman and Sony's own Jumanji. But if this is the "one for me" that Ridley Scott gets to make for occasionally going back to the Alien franchise, then sign me up for all the Prometheus sequels you can muster.

Penned by David Scarpa and based on John Pearson’s non-fiction book Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty, this gripping, polished and consistently tense docudrama revels in the details of its infamous true crime tale, while shunning melodrama or much in the way of morality or sentiment. It is something of a miracle in the modern age, a decently-budgeted studio-backed thriller from, about and for adult moviegoers in the heart of the Christmas season. I imagine this would have been a tough sell even in the mid-1990’s, but Sony’s faith in it in 2017 is the kind of thing that makes me feel less conflicted about those Spider-Man spin-offs.

So, with John Paul the third (Charlie Plummer) being held captive by Italian criminals with mafia connections, Getty instead entrusts former spy Fletcher Chase (Mark Wahlberg), a former CIA man skilled in negotiation and crisis management, to travel with the boy’s mother to Italy and attempt to extract the young man as inexpensively as possible. And that’s the movie in a nutshell. If you’re lucky enough to not be well-versed in somewhat recent history, I won’t dare dream of telling you how it ends.

I don’t know how Ridley Scott, at the tender age of 80-years old, managed to essentially reshoot much of All the Money in the World in about a week. But, come what may in terms of extra expense (around $10 million added to a $40m budget), I’m glad he did. Christopher Plummer gives one of his better performances this side of The Insider, and it’s now difficult to even imagine Kevin Spacey (in heavy prosthetics) playing the role of John Paul Getty. Plummer’s low-key, simmering performance anchors the film (this isn’t some glorified cameo), and the picture walks a tightrope of establishing his point-of-view while deftly holding up a harsh light on his actions and thus his legacy.

If Plummer gives the movie its juice, then Michelle Williams gives it its soul. She is terrific (per usual) as a desperate mother who wants nothing to do with her insanely wealthy former relatives but finds herself negotiating with two different sides of a brick wall. And while Wahlberg is sympathetic, there is only so much he can do with kidnappers who don’t realize how little Getty cares about his grandson and a tycoon who seemingly thinks that it’s either a bluff or not worth the potential expense to give in to criminals. Sure, he may pay millions of dollars for a piece of random art, but that is a concrete deal with no variables and no downside beyond the mere exchange of currency for goods.

All the Money in the World is a brutally efficient and strikingly enjoyable bit of true-life pulp fiction. It refuses to villainize its most famed figure even while letting his own actions hang him out to dry. It offers Ridley Scott at the top of his “humanity stinks and maybe we don’t deserve better” game, along with superb turns by Williams, Wahlberg and Plummer. I don’t know whether the race to cut replace Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer will give the film a boost in a crowded Christmas or merely be the film’s overall legacy. But however it got made, All the Money in the World is very good and very much worth your time.

Read complete review at Forbes

Movie Rating  ★★★★☆  

Kevin Spacey replacement Christopher Plummer is worth every penny

Robbie Collin

When it comes to the bone-splintering crunch of it, how much in cold, hard currency are any of us actually worth? It’s a question Kevin Spacey must have asked himself after his performance as the oil baron J Paul Getty was cut from Ridley Scott’s new film in light of widespread allegations of sexual harassment.

The answer in Spacey’s case is evidently far less than the cost of the extraordinary 11th-hour reshoots which saw Scott’s all-but-finished film hauled back into production for nine days, during which the disgraced actor’s performance was replaced in full by Christopher Plummer – Scott’s original choice for the role, until the studio persuaded him to cast the bigger star. But the question is also a central plank of the film itself.

This is a stylishly streamlined, thriller-ised account of the kidnapping of Getty Sr’s grandson Paul in 1973, and the mayhem that ensued when the old man – then the richest who had ever lived – refused to pay a penny for the boy’s release.

The film is a barnstormer on its own terms, but knowledge of its last-second reworking undoubtedly gives the action an extra purr of panic, as if Sir Ridley himself might be tucked behind the cinema screen, adding finishing touches while you watch.

First and foremost, the film confirms Christopher as the most reliable emergency Plummer in history. He is icily brilliant in the role, making Getty a cloistered empire-builder in the Ridley Scott tradition, alongside Gladiator’s Emperor Commodus, Blade Runner’s Eldon Tyrell and Alien: Covenant’s Peter Weyland. Like them, Getty is a man not drunk on power, but driven so stonily sober by its possibilities, he has come to see the workings of the world in a frosty new light.

The muscular screenplay by David Scarpa, adapted from a biography of Getty Sr by John Pearson, swan-dives right into the moral black hole that opens up when a human life becomes an asset to be cashed in or carved up at the discretion of investors.

As ever with Scott, the film unfolds in a richly realised world and moves with an addictive, free-wheeling swagger. And his four main actors – Williams, Wahlberg and the Plummers old and young – have all been astutely cast. Michelle Williams is particularly good – there is a trace of Audrey Hepburn in her increasingly weary Mid-Atlantic inflections – while the strong physical resemblance between her and Paul helps set the two a step apart from the baleful Getty clan.

The film suggests Getty Sr would love nothing more than to turn his family into a dynasty – a fine way to turn fallible flesh and blood into a cast-iron long-term investment.

 Read complete review at Telegraph

How to save a film in six weeks

Kennith Rosario

There’s a reason why J. Paul Getty (Christopher Plummer) titled his book of financial advice, How to Be Rich. The publisher, he informs, insisted on it being changed to ‘How to Get Rich’, but he stood his ground. “Any fool can get rich, but staying rich is the tough part,” he declares, nonchalantly. It’s not simply the desire to remain rich but the hunger to be the richest man in history that made Getty a ruthless American billionaire, one who notoriously refused to pay a ransom of $17million to his grandson’s Italian kidnappers.

Getty’s logic is simple: he has 14 grandchildren and paying ransom for one would endanger the others. But it’s not the lives he is worried about; it’s his fortune that is more precious. Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, based on John Pearson’s 1995 book, Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty, is founded on the notorious penuriousness of Getty, without delving deep into his psychology. The film refuses to justify the extremity of his character, but in that, manages to rile and frustrate you, for you don’t know why he is the way he is. His wilful acceptance of a lonely, materialistic life over human connections, renders you unable to sympathise with him; it only agitates you.

In a film filled with balanced performances, Plummer’s last minute entry into Getty’s shoes, barely six weeks before its release (after the removal of Kevin Spacey following sexual harassment allegations), is undoubtedly the best thing to have happened to the stylish crime drama. Apart from being more age appropriate to the role, the 88-year-old actor also brings along his refined hold over acting, which, in several ways, is irreplaceable. Once you’ve seen the film, Getty would be synonymous with Plummer for posterity, and Spacey’s initial involvement in it would only go down as trivia.

All the Money in the World is an emotionally distant film, which focuses on style and storytelling. What you must watch out for are the subtle political undertones of European communism and American capitalism, which could provide ample fodder for an elaborate post-film conversation (example: what would have Trump done?). “You have to give me some time. I am fighting an empire here,” says an exasperated Williams, to the most helpful kidnapper over the phone. “You’re not the only one,” the penurious criminal quickly retorts. The Gettys are the beacon of bourgeoisdom, the kidnappers are proletariat, and the crime – perhaps an act of revolution.

 Read complete review at The Hindu