Movie Review: Christopher Plummer Saves the Kevin Spacey-Free “All the Money in the World”

It cost Ridley Scott $10 million to de-Spacey-fi his movie in under five weeks. Can we get a Kickstarter going to expunge him from Baby Driver now too?

Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World has been rescued from ignominy—featuring what would have likely been one of the year’s most embarrassing, latex-slathered performances, delivered by the newly scandal-ridden Kevin Spacey—and made infamous for different reasons—cutting Spacey at the eleventh hour and replacing him with Christopher Plummer in one of cinema’s all-time great PR Hail Marys.

All this behind-the-scenes drama makes you wish the picture itself was especially notable, rather than just the circumstances around it. All the Money in the World is another workmanlike feature from Scott, whose vigour at age 80 remains exceptionally impressive, even if his late-stage efforts aren’t.

The greatest irony: Though the decision to delete Spacey was both a commercial and moral one, it’s also the film’s smartest creative stroke. The towering Christopher Plummer needs no prosthetics to inhabit the character of miserly American billionaire J. Paul Getty, or to captivate us. His Golden Globe nomination for the part may have been a pat on the back—he had only finished shooting 11 days earlier—but he certainly makes a meal of his performance. Without it, All the Money in the World would starve.

It dramatises the 1973 abduction of John Paul Getty III (Charlie Plummer, no relation; wouldn’t that have been something?) in Rome. His grandfather, we’re regularly reminded, was the richest man in history at the time, which made his descendants easy targets. John Paul’s captor, Cinquanta (Romain Duris), demands $17 million from Getty Snr. He counters with $0. You don’t become the world’s wealthiest person by giving away millions, Getty reasons, while doing his own laundry to save a few extra lire.

The burden of negotiation falls to John Paul’s mother, Gail Harris (Michelle Williams), aka the estranged daughter-in-law of J. Paul Getty, and Fletcher Chase (Mark Wahlberg), a former CIA agent and Getty’s chief of security. When the gravity of the boy’s situation becomes apparent—as in, when the kidnappers start posting body parts back—Gail and Fletcher find themselves not only negotiating with Cinquanta but the older Getty too. As the clock ticks, they work to bring the ransom figure down to a number the elder billionaire will find palatable. He softens—a little—after learning it’s tax deductible.

Screenwriter David Scarpa takes a few liberties with the historical record here, which is mostly fine because he’s making a film and not being quizzed by a judiciary panel. It takes the traditional ‘kidnap thriller’ form and manages to remain consistently entertaining for its two hours and twenty minutes. However, I cannot overstate how welcome Plummer’s scenes are, even when he’s briefly there to nibble scenery. He’s fantastic cinematic punctuation.

Williams is good while battling a Transatlantic accent, and Wahlberg, well, he’s been good elsewhere. Scott and Scarpa never quite decide if they want Fletcher Chase to be a smooth-talking CIA spook or an imposing street tough, so Wahlberg falls back to his standard mode of delivering statements as if they were vaguely intimidating questions, lilting upwards at the end of each line? Couldn’t Plummer have pulled double-duty here as well?

Scott deploys a few flourishes to keep things interesting, for himself and us. The opening shot of Charlie Plummer strolling through Rome plays in black-and-white, recalling Federico Fellini. Later, the scenes with an increasingly-detached Getty, alone in his mansion, grow more baroque—from the operatic score to the domineering lighting—bringing to mind a certain Citizen Kane in his dying days.

It’s hard to say if All the Money in the World will be given a fair shake by audiences in the wake of its surrounding controversy. My suspicion is that it’ll be regarded positively because of its changes. A number of eagle-eyed viewers will attempt to spot the remaining long shots of Spacey (I felt like I caught two), or identify the difference between the final product and the early footage from the first trailer (one summer time sequence is now definitely set during the winter). And what of those who never knew about the last-minute switcharoo? They’ll probably still be enraptured by Christopher Plummer, thinking how he saved this otherwise ordinary film, in more ways than they realise.

3/5

In cinemas 11 January 2018. Rated MA15+ for strong themes and violence.