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Wednesday, March 7, 2018

All the Money in the World (2017)

The problem with this movie is that for a person as thoroughly unlikable as J. Paul Getty (played by Christopher Plummer in an Academy Award Nominated role) is that the movie really needs to be an hour and a half.  Nobody should have to sit through a story involving a character this dreadful should not have to do so for two hours.  His grandson was kidnapped and held for a ransom that was the amount he made on a daily basis.  If he had just done what most people would do, the movie could have been fifteen minutes.  Instead he haggles with the kidnappers, refusing to discuss it with them, and essentially allows a relative he professes to love suffer irreversible emotional and physical damage.
Getty was the richest man in the world, but he is obnoxiously self satisfied and arrogant about it.  This recapitulates the  data we have about plutocrats, that they believe they are truly better than the rest of us.  He is also an emotionally stunted and perhaps mentally ill person with access to billions who allowed a blood relative to suffer just so that he can save a few bucks.  If the assertion that he say himself as Hadrian reincarnate has any merit, he was also delusional.  In other words, it’s not the money, it’s him. It is the affront to his power and control, and by god, he wasn't having any of it.  The consequences be damned.  Plummer does an excellent job of being a thoroughly disgusting man with no redeeming qualities, made all the more remarkable by the fact that he was not originally in the movie.  He was brought in when Kevin Spacey left under a cloud of scandal, and did it all being splice in.  It did however made me regret going to the museum that bears his name.

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