All The Money In The World review: Emergency Plummer can't save this lackluster drama

Kevin Spacey was replaced at the last minute from this true tale of John Paul Getty III’s kidnap
Guy Lodge16 January 2018

We all already know the jaw-dropping twist in the tale of Ridley Scott’s latest lacquered mega-production, and it has nothing to do with the fact-based but belief-defying narrative — the tall, true tale of teenage oil-empire heir John Paul Getty III’s kidnapping in 1973 — of the film itself.

On October 29 last year, incendiary, career-unravelling allegations of sexual assault were made against Kevin Spacey, then courting Oscar chatter for his turn as J Paul Getty, the family’s patriarch and the kidnapped boy’s grandfather, in Scott’s wrapped-and-ready true-crime drama. On November 8, Scott announced that Spacey’s now-toxic image would be removed from the film, to be gallantly replaced by Christopher Plummer.

Reshoots began on November 20 and finished on November 29; on December 18, the finished, de-Spaceyed film premiered in the US.

The zealous, clock-watching efficiency of Scott’s emergency Plummer callout is without precedent in Hollywood lore — it’s not hyperbolic to call it the stuff of instant industry legend. Yet it’s also the only thing for which this expensive charcoal obelisk of a film is likely to be remembered, a talking point that its perspective-free recreation of a lurid 1970s tabloid episode otherwise lacks.

As mostly seamless as Plummer’s integration into the film is, you find yourself looking for the joins and fixes, catching the ghost of Spacey in certain darkened silhouette shots. This might have been unavoidable, but All the Money in the World is too stolid and sluggish to distract us from its own behind-the-scenes drama.

Seamless: Christopher Plummer in All The Money In The World

That’s not for want of activity or an abundance of shiny objects on screen. In its opening scenes the film bounces loosely across decades, establishing the ruthless credo and exhaustive wheeler-dealing across international oil fields that made industrialist J. Paul Getty the world’s richest private citizen.

Dariusz Wolski’s stately cinematography gazes across the endless, art-encrusted expanses of his personal estate in solemn hues of marble, lending the film the appreciative but dispassionate eye of a Sotheby’s collector.
That same varnish applies even when we cut to the seamy backstreets of Rome in 1973, where a cocky, gaudy-blazered American teen rejects several streetwalkers’ cooing advances before being grabbed and bundled into a van by masked assailants.

The teen is Paul, played with hard-eyed assurance by Charlie Plummer (no relation, incidentally), though family ties in this dynasty are frayed and conditional. When the kidnappers call the boy’s stunned mother Gail (Michelle Williams) with a multi-million-dollar ransom demand, she counters that she has no money. A Getty? Broke? What gives? “Get it from your father-in-law,” the criminals demand in Dolmio-thick accents. “He has all the money in the world.”

David Scarpa’s heavy-treading script isn’t afraid to quote its own title on multiple occasions; it’s less direct, however, when it comes to the inner lives and finer details of its chilly, opaque characters.

Flashbacks sketch the outline of a rift between the elder Getty and his son John Paul Jr (Andrew Buchan), whose married life with Gail is financially strained. Reconciliation with the old man first makes, then breaks, the family, as money brings dissolution and divorce. When the cut-loose Gail formally asks the famously frugal tycoon to pay the ransom and free her son, he refuses, instead dispatching his adviser Fletcher Chase (Mark Wahlberg) to Rome to handle the matter more thriftily — for Getty, no crisis is so personal or perilous that a deal can’t be cut.

Suitably moneyed: the story follows the hard hearted John Paul Getty
Sony Pictures Entertainment

This is material feverish with family-wide moral illness and psychic pain — well before the grisly business of a severed ear — but neither Scott nor Scarpa seems especially interested in parsing it. Instead, All the Money in the World plays out in purely procedural terms, dividing its attention stoically between young Paul’s mucky captivity, Abigail’s maternal anguish and Getty’s ivory-tower inertia, with no discernible point of view on any one of the three.

Scott can crank up the suspense effectively enough when required, but for long, grey swathes of the two-hour-plus proceedings we watch these characters frozen in their respective binds, trying to figure out who, beyond their remarkable circumstances, they really are.

The ever-diligent Williams, affecting a starchy accent, is stymied by the sheer blank-slate vagueness of Abigail: she carries the film’s emotional burden in theory, yet it’s hard to tell if she even likes the son she’s rescuing. “You’re not a person any more, you’re a symbol,” Chase tells her, and the film takes much the same view.

At least Plummer got a clearer directive for his 11th-hour assignment: his Getty is a creature of wholly material passions, and if Plummer’s late casting gave him no time to find the soul of the man, that’s an advantage when there’s none to be found. If only more of this suitably moneyed but fist-hearted movie worked in opposition to his shivery detachment.

Cert 15, 133 mins

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