Reviews

Warning- Contains spoilers and opinions

Well, let me mark my Nobel ballot "no" for Merle Streep to win a Nobel Peace Prize for this thinly disguised, poorly researched drama about a woman who loses her husband in a boating accident and how the big, bad insurance companies and bankers cheated her out of a settlement.

After finding out from her Las Vegas realtor that her down payment check on a Strip-facing penthouse is ISF, she doggedly seeks answers then revenge by traveling extensively on her husband's "meager" retirement funds. She even resorts to wearing a disguise while living and working illegally in Panama for the dastardly bankers who formed the shell companies that stole her settlement money. The disguise, by the way, is at least to my eyes, so amateurish that even my 2-year old grandson would have spotted it in a second.

Why do I take exception to this piece of nonsense? Let's begin with the "crime" itself. The lake excursion boat is struck by a rogue wave, perhaps caused by a rogue supertanker that somehow got into the lake thru an unsupervised lock. The boat flips and over half the people drown without so much as a single stroke of the arm. We are additionally treated to a full face look at Streep as others drown and she stares into the camera. Could you at least help one person, Merle? BTW- her makeup artist should have been fired after seeing the dailies but that is not my field of expertise.

Sometime later, Streep meets with her lawyer (because we all have one on retainer) and he tells her the bad news- no money from the giant insurance company but, hey, your dead husband left you comfortable. Take a trip. Treat yourself. Buy a Las Vegas penthouse like the rest of us would have done with our money.

Here's the thing- there is no giant insurance company dumb enough to write a liability policy on a clearly unsafe excursion boat that is so easily swamped by a rogue lake wave from that super tanker that we spoke of earlier. No life jackets floating around either? It's going to be a Lloyd's specialty underwriter and it's going to be pricey. But let's continue.

Somehow it is discovered that the mean bankers have placed the liability policy with a "shell" company in the Caribbean. They really hammer the word "shell" as if they've decoded a Sanskrit manuscript. Eyebrows are launched, mouthed twisted and Streep climbs aboard a plane and heads to the Caribbean island where it is revealed that a man and his secretary do nothing but sign documents for "shell" companies created by the mean bankers in Panama.

Somehow, superwoman Streep manages to uncover the Caribbean bad guys second family in Miami and gets him arrested, too. Then she jets off to Panama where she promptly breaks the law by disguising herself, obtains employment under false pretenses and identity and outs the bad guys there, too.

In between, the movie shows how some African millionaire cheats his wife and daughter out of money they accepted as bribes from him in the first place! If I cared, I'd go back and research this part of the movie to see if Streep somehow disguised herself and infiltrated the family as an African American.

In the end, all the baddies get what they have coming and Streep, still dressed as the illegal Panamanian bank employee, breaks the fourth wall and begins pulling off wigs and make-up as she explains how all this kind of business happens all the time and we must be vigilant and pursue the truth or something. Sorry, I got lost at the end when she begins brushing her real hair, fluffing it up as she explains all this to us. So called "shell" companies are an epidemic and rotten bankers as common as sea shells on a Panamanian beach and this kind of fraud takes place all the time. Blah blah blah.

Look- let's consider that Hollywood wouldn't exist without shady business practices, financial fraud and shell companies. Ask any performance bond company who they're owned by and they'll hit you with a restraining order faster than you can say OJ Simpson. Most performance bond companies are either wholly or partially owned by the studios. The studios purchase performance bonds (or it might be called a completion bond) to insure that a movie or TV show makes enough money in profits to show up as black ink in their accountants books (one of the sets). If the movie tanks and/or it goes straight to DVD, the studio pays themselves for their failure. Next time the credits roll on a big time movie, pause it towards the end of the credits and make note of the companies that pay salaries, insure the production, the accounting firms and then Google them. How many are subsidiaries of the studios? How many are registered in states with liberal incorporation laws like Delaware, Wyoming.... the very states that Banderas and Oldham name in their clever narrative thru-out the movie.

If you wonder about what actors and directors do when they aren't working on a movie or TV show, they sometimes form production companies. They have actual offices, hire staff and look over whatever scripts or other "projects" come their way. They log time, pay staff and when tax time comes, they claim loses on their taxes because they didn't produce anything profitable. (There are those who do make a profit)

Wait- what about those shell companies Merle was pouting about? Well, those are formed when actors like Streep get paid $14 million dollars to perform. She probably nets about 1/4 of that salary in real money from which she pays her agent, management company, staff at her offices and they rest go into investments here and overseas where no or little taxes are paid. That's not illegal, by the way. But it is something only the wealthy can do.

So, to have Streep, Antonio Banderas and Gary Oldman, all millionaires, take part in a movie taking aim at banking practices and shell companies on behalf of us poor peons who don't understand such complicated issues is insulting and galling. Of all the places to produce a movie about illegal activities in banking, insurance and accounting- Hollywood, land of accounting practices that would make your brain explode!

It is simply a matter of the pot calling the kettle black.