Steven Soderbergh’s disappointing The Laundromat takes on the Panama Papers scandal of 2015, in which the shady law firm of Mossack Fonseca enabled hundreds of global fraudsters and tax cheats. Intended as an expose of financial malfeasance, it only succeeds as a demonstration of cinematic waste. There’s way too much talent harnessed to result in such a shallow imitation of The Big Short.
Meryl Streep plays an Everywoman who gets swindled by a corrupt system and by individual crooks played by Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas and Jeffrey Wright. If there’s anything worthy about this film, it’s Oldman and Banderas, who get to break the fourth wall and blithely explain their cons to the camera – the same function that Margot Robbie, in a bubble bath, filled in The Big Short.
There just isn’t anything to engage the audience here. Worse, The Laundromat muddles it message by toggling between what’s legal and what’s not. The film explicitly claims that the crookedness depicted is legal, but it actually shows lots and lots of fraud – and fraud is already illegal. The real scandal, of course, is that the system is rigged so the big financial interests can LEGALLY screw the rest of us
It all culminates in a corny final shot that not even Streep can make convincing or palatable. If you MUST watch this crap, it’s streaming on Netflix.