Here's a link to a new Vanity Fair article detailing the full story of the kidnapping J. Paul Getty III. Reading it would be a better use of your time than going to see , Ridley Scott's meandering dramatization of the early 1970s event which saw the richest man in the world (oil tycoon Paul Getty) refusing to pay the ransom when his estranged, teenage grandson was kidnapped in Rome. The various twists and turns of the case aren't compelling enough on their own to justify the movie treatment. So, for All the Money in the World to justify its own existence it needs to tell us something larger about the major players in the drama. It certainly tries, invoking its own title two separate times to get at what could make a man who has all the money in the world refuse to part with any of it to save his own blood. However, apart from an inspired Christopher Plummer performance, there's nothing here you'll remember after leaving the theater.
Yet All the Money in the World is actually historically important. This is the movie that put everyone in Hollywood on notice: if you misbehave you can be taken out of an otherwise completed film with astonishing ease. Shortly after the world discovered the depth and history of Kevin Spacey's sexual predation, Ridley Scott and Christopher Plummer took to a stage somewhere to green screen Spacey's performance as Paul Getty out of existence. They started this process a mere six weeks before the release date, an absolutely unheard of timeline to replace a major character in a live-action movie. Plummer agreed to it before he even read the script, sensing both the importance of the moment while also relishing the challenge. The irony is Plummer should have been playing the part in the first place. It didn't make sense to cast Spacey and have him play nearly three decades above his actual age via old age makeup when an actor of Plummer caliber was ready and available.
Which means All the Money in the World was always destined to invite its audience to stare at the actor playing Paul Getty and decide if he looks convincing enough. Originally, it was Spacey buried under a mountain of makeup, and now its Plummer digitally inserted over and sometimes onto Spacey's body. Astonishingly, they pulled it off almost seamlessly. Not that you'll think so right away since Plummer's first scene is as fake-looking as it gets. His face and body fail to even enter into the kinda convincing, yet still unmistakably uncanny valley territory of Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher's recreated selves from Rogue One. Nope. You look at it and think they only had access to late 90s era special effects. After that, though, the effect corrects itself so quickly and turns so convincing you'd never guess Plummer wasn't simply part of the original production, trading dialogue with Mark Wahlberg (trying and failing to hold his own with more talented co-stars) and Michelle Williams (speaking in a Kennedy-esque accent and outacting everyone other than Plummer).
The problem is once the curiosity of "how convincing does he look?" passes the film fails to hold your attention. It's slow-moving, overly jumbled in an opening first half which zigs and zags between different time periods (and color and black & white) without rhyme or reason, and so concerned we won't care about the story's rich people problems that a tacked-on voice-over literally has J. Paul Getty pleading with us to try and understand that rich people were just like us once (apparently asking us to ignore the notion of inherited wealth).
Wahlberg's former CIA agent, employed by Getty to assist in retrieving his grandson, spells that out even further for us when he tells Williams (playing the younger Getty's mother, who married into and divorced out of the Getty family and was struggling financially at the time of the kidnapping) that negotiating with rich people is always more about what they didn't used to have versus what they want now. The idea being there's always some impoverished childhood, tortured past, or challenged relationship with a father which is at the heart of their money mongering.
That, in a way, could have set All the Money in the World up to be something special or at least interesting for its timeliness. We're living through a period where trickle-down economics has come back with a vengeance, outwardly pledging to save an economy which sees the gap between the 1% and 99% widening to historic levels while inwardly simply striving to line the pockets of the rich with lucrative tax cut s. At the same time, women are striving to topple the patriarchy, crack into male-dominated industries, and take down old sexist ideas that refuse to go away.
All the Money in the World reflects all of that in its 70s-set tale of an obscenely rich man who talks of his love for tax deductions about as much as normal people talk about the weather (seriously, Plummer mentions taxes in just about every scene), and a concerned mother separated from her son not by kidnappers (one of whom becomes more sympathetic as the film progresses) but instead by corporate politics (personified here in the form of a sea of male lawyers and Getty) prioritizing money over human life. How far would or even could a mother go to save her son in such a situation? And what exactly makes a person like Paul Getty tick?
If only the movie had satisfactory answers to the questions or the discipline to settle on any one angle on the story. Instead, there's the story of the kidnapping from J. Paul and his kidnapper's point of view. Then there's the more domestic angle of Wahlberg and Williams quarreling over how best to save her son. Then there's Wahlberg reporting back to Plummer, who occasionally reveals a somewhat human side (turns out, he did have a shitty dad, and he does love his grandson or at least says he does). These three parts never feel properly balanced, to the point that Williams and Wahlberg are suddenly shoved into the background during the build-up to the finale. The most consistent through-line seems to simply be that Rome sure is pretty, an awful lot of people smoked back then, and having all the money in the world is more a symptom of a God complex and underlying pathology than simple greed.
THE BOTTOM LINEPlummer (or at least his face on Spacey's body) impresses, playing the kind of role he could probably do in his sleep but still managing to look as invigorated and engaged as ever. Williams holds our attention through sheer tenacity. However, the movie isn't worthy of either of them. So, skip All the Money in the World. Wait for Danny Boyle's Trust, the 2018 FX TV series dramatizing the same story.
RANDOM PARTING THOUGHTS- The kidnapped J. Paul Getty had several siblings back at home safe with his mother. All the Money in the World has almost zero interest in this fact.
- Mark Wahlberg generally struggles as an actor when he has to play hyper-intelligent people. He's even said he only ever did The Happening so he could play a smart person for a change, in that case, a science teacher. That didn't work out so well for him there and it doesn't here either, which is deeply unfortunate since the most important turn in the movie hinges on a blistering speech his character delivers to Getty.
