MOVIE REVIEW - "The Laundromat" (2019)
Synopsis: After being dealt a blow, a widow seeks answers (referring to compensation after her husband's death) and comes across two dubious moral lawyers who work in partnership, hiding money for millionaires in Panama City through schemes corrupt.
No use denying, money is the spring that moves the world (who insists on denying it, is wasting time) and it is precisely on this truth that this film deals in an unusual way by bringing scandals involving shell companies, money laundering and tax havens... A creative approach, but one that doesn't result in such an exciting end product.
Building itself on a real scandal that has been going on since the 1970s in Panama City, the script focuses on the information leak (11.5 million secret files) attributed to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The episode (which took place in 2017) exposed the law firm Mossack Fonseca and revealed a huge illicit scheme involving great figures from the political world.
Considering this scenario extremely conducive to various kinds of approaches, the writers set aside much of the dramatic potential (without completely excluding it) and preferred to follow the line of watered comedy with a few moments of tension. Particularly speaking, I think the comic excess of the plot overrode much of the weight the story carries and this makes the movie less impactful than it should be.
The main focus is on 3 characters: the pair of unscrupulous swindlers who are engaging in all sorts of frauds (and are responsible for architecting several of them) and a distraught widow who decides to turn into a detective... Soon, the destinies of them will intersect and a real patchwork will be undone, revealing many schemes kept in the dark behind the scenes of the financial world.
Each character has very distinct characteristics (which is essential for creating a rapprochement with the audience and making them loyal as important figures in the plot) and they connect well throughout the projection. However, the movie does not stay on track for long and insists on losing focus steadily (for example: investing in bad jokes and some weird situations), causing the viewer to be distracted by laughable elements that add nothing to the movie. construction of what is being told.
In the cast, big names like Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas head the star team. But none of them can save the movie from a constant pace of monotony that becomes increasingly boring as the scenes progress (mainly by choosing to narrate many of the events in a lazy and lacking creativity way).
Although all of them (including the supporting cast) deliver good performances, everything is conducted in a very out of place manner. The feeling when watching this movie is that you want to assemble a puzzle with several different pieces together ... That is, you can never finish assembling it. So being frustrated with the climax outcome (as well as the whole construction of the movie) is almost inevitable, which makes the experience of watching it disappointing.
In the boat of disappointment are also the editing of scenes (which even tries to be inventive, but delivers nothing out of the ordinary and stays in sameness), photography (predictable and disposable) and lack of a more significant soundtrack to score at least the key moments where the film would naturally tend to grow and present itself as a truly relevant project.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh (who definitely delivers one of the career's most uninspiring and lazy works) in a slow, unpulsed way, the plot takes time to stabilize the audience on the central plot and show the importance of what's to come. Almost everything is here sleepy and average performed, even by the standards of Sodergerh's own cinematography.
The Laundromat is a movie that deals with a very important subject, but unfortunately it does so in a very pretentious way, betting on a scruffy humor (disguised as "a skillful way on how to handle political affairs") that however hard it may be (in relation to general context) cannot reach the top of its potential.
MOVIE URL: The Laundromat
MY RATING: A (6/10)
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