A look at the great financial shell game

Director Steven Soderbergh brings a comic touch to The Laundromat, a story based on the Panama Papers scandal.

Director Steven Soderbergh aims at the absurdities of a wealth-obsessed world in The Laundromat, a Netflix movie that feels like a collection of skits revolving around the Panama Papers scandal of 2016.

That financial mess involved a massive leak of files showing how the very rich (or at least some of them) could use shell corporations to shield themselves from a variety of troublesome intrusions, matters such as income tax or various liabilities.

The Laundromat, which begs for comparison with 2015's livelier The Big Short, uses a variety of techniques to create a farrago of sketches, many presented with the kind of gimmickry that defies cinematic convention, everything from breaking the fourth wall to chapter headings such as The Meek Are Screwed.

The movie is held together by two figures played by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas. They are, respectively, Oldman's Jurgen Mossack and Banderas's Ramon Fonesca, characters who might have popped out of a Pinter play. They often address the audience, acting as guides to the financial maneuvering at movie's core.

Speaking in a comic German accent, Oldman seems the more pragmatic of the duo. If there's romanticism in financial chicanery, Banderas finds it.

Ramon and Jurgen are lawyers who run a firm that specializes in creating shell companies. No questions asked. Secrecy respected. If these corporations lack substance ... well ... shouldn't wealthy people be allowed to park their cash somewhere without agents from the IRS crawling all over it?

Working from a screenplay by Scott Z. Burns, Soderbergh tries to show how the damage caused by all this subterfuge can impact those whose financial calculations extend no further than trying to balance a checkbook.

Meryl Streep portrays Ellen Martin, a woman who loses her husband (James Cromwell) in a boating accident on Lake George, NY. Ellen believes that she will collect an insurance settlement from the boating company.

Ellen soon learns that the company had been duped by someone who sold it insurance from a company that wended its way toward the portfolio of an outfit that existed only on paper. Ellen turns up at various points in the story to remind us that all this high-flying finagling can actually connect to ordinary folks.

This portion of the movie introduces us to a character played by Jeffrey Wright, an accountant who lives in Nevis, a West Indian island off the beaten tourist track. Ellen shows up there to track down the company that owns the insurance company that was supposed to compensate her for her loss.

None of this is to say that The Laundromat has a great deal of bite. It's mostly bark presented by Soderbergh with the winking buoyancy of a caper movie.

As Soderbergh works his way through the story, the movie makes a long stop at the palatial home of a wealthy man (Nonso Anozie) who's dallying with his daughter's college roommate. Anozie's Charles' approach to problem-solving: Award any aggrieved party with bearer shares that he claims are worth mega-millions.

Later, we meet a slick wheeler-dealer (Mathias Schoenaerts) who tries to exert his power over a Chinese woman (Rosalind Chao) who isn't going to fall so easily.

Put all this together and you have an airy concoction that amuses even if it doesn't pack the clout we might expect. By the end, I half wondered whether Soderbergh wasn't saying that any society that allows its economy to create financial instruments (i.e., paper) that have the appearance of worth without any reality to support them deserves what it gets — in the end, a handful of nothing.

A recreation of a daring Israeli raid

7 Days in Entebbe isn't a bad movie, but it doesn't dig deep enough to be memorable.

In 1976, Israel launched Operation Thunderbolt, a daring raid in which a small group of IDF soldiers rescued 102 Israelis who had been passengers on an Air France plane that was hijacked by two Germans and two Palestinians.

7 Days in Entebbe, a movie about the hijacking and subsequent Israeli action, arrives nearly 42 years after an event that riveted world attention. Daniel Bruhl and Rosamund Pike headline the cast as German radicals who initially thought they were leading the charge but who quickly were surpassed by Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The Palestinians took charge once the plane arrived in Uganda, after a refueling stop in Benghazi, Libya. Once in Entebbe, hostages were housed in a decaying airport terminal that was no longer in use.

Movies such as 7 Days raise an obvious but unavoidable question. Why are we being asked to look at an event that since has been eclipsed by so many other events involving terrorist actions that put innocent civilians in harm's way? In part, the question can be answered with one sentence: Such events are inherently exciting and suspenseful.

But for a movie to succeed, it must get beyond that surface and dig deeper? As directed by Jose Padilha, 7 Days fails to function as more than a cinematic outline, offering quick looks into the motivation of the story's various players.

No stranger to tough, action-oriented movies, Padilha directed the Netflix series Narcos and made Bus 174, a documentary about hostages trapped on a bus in Rio. He also directed Elite Squad, a compelling Brazilian police drama. In 2014, Padilha tried his hand at a Hollywood reboot, a much-derided version of RoboCop .

7 Days emphasizes the importance of the moment at which the hijackers separated Jews from the non-Jews, evoking memories of Holocaust selections in the minds of the Jewish passengers and among the Israeli public.

The highest levels of the Israeli government also took note of the separate treatment of Jews as issues pertaining to saving the hostages were debated. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Lior Ashkenazi) and Defense Minister Shimon Peres (Eddie Marsan) took different sides.

Rabin knew he had to do something but wasn’t entirely sure that he should dismiss the possibility of negotiating with the Palestinians, something that went against Israeli policy forbidding talks with terrorists. Perez favored military action.

At one point, Uganda's Idi Amin (nicely played by Nonso Anozie) gets involved. He’s able to persuade the Palestinians to release the French hostages.

Padilha’s strangest decision involves the use of the Batsheva Dance Company which does a jarring musical version of Echad Mi Yodea (Who Knows One), a song usually sung at Passover seders. Staged by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, the dance -- seen in rehearsals and eventually in a performance -- proves compelling but because it opens the movie, it tends to upstage the rest of the story and it's never entirely clear why Padihla includes it.

To justify the dance sequence, the screenplay must introduce a superfluous tangent, a relationship between a dancer and one of the Israeli soldiers on the Entebbe raid.

Whatever Padihla was attempting to accomplish, he winds up looking a bit ridiculous when he alternates between a performance of the dance and the movie's climactic end-of-picture rescue.

There’s not much by way of character development among the crew and passengers, aside from a crew member (Denis Menochet) who tries to reason with Bruhl’s character, a publisher of radical books who already has his doubts about the role he’s chosen for himself as a German who may be called upon to kill Jews. The screenplay assigns Bruhl's character a role in saving the lives of the Jewish passengers.

Even Pike’s character, a Baader-Meinhof veteran and the more hardened of the two Germans, eventually admits she might have made a wrong choice.

Padilha knows how to give a realistic pulse to action, and the movie offers an important footnote at the end. Yonatan Netanyahu (Angel Bonanni), the only Israeli soldier to die in the raid, was the brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current prime minister.

Eventually, the movie tells us that if peace ever is to be achieved, Israel must swallow hard and negotiate. 7 Days in Entebbe does little to make that conclusion feel like more than a faint hope, an afterthought rather than a genuine expression of conviction.