‘Mad Money’ is a flaming pile of crap

“The truth is we’re all capable of anything. We don’t realize it. But it’s true.” These untrue words are spoken by Diane Keaton at the beginning of Mad Money, and though they are not meant to make you think back on Diane Keaton’s career, you cannot help it. Watching Diane Keaton try to appease a neighbor’s dog by throwing it a slab of meat so she can make a getaway in the opening sequence, you cannot prevent your mind from recalling the Diane Keaton of Love and Death and Sleeper and Manhattan and Annie Hall and wondering, grimly, what happened in the intervening decades. Outwardly, she hasn’t changed much, but something serious is afoot. Brain leak? Body snatching? Shape shifting? Robot replacement? Could she just be gassy? We would all like to think that Diane Keaton is more than just hats and belts and Woody Allen jokes, that she’s a person with dignity, a person who’s learned from herself, a person who wouldn’t subject herself, and the audience she’s built, to flaming piles of crap, but Mad Money is a flaming pile of crap.

It begins with cash—piles and piles of cash—being set on fire and flushed down a toilet. As an ur-metaphor for the creation of Mad Money itself this is hard to beat; however the ur-metaphor is unintentional. The burning/flushing of money is actually a flash-forward from the basic narrative, which begins with Keaton and Ted Danson fighting about how they’re going to pay the bills and proceeds directly to Keaton drably dressed and pushing a janitor’s cart through the corridors of the Federal Reserve. At long last she and Queen Latifah (same as always) and Katie Holmes (twitchy and permed) are shoving bricks of discarded bills into their underwear. Not that you didn’t know that was coming, what with the end of the movie at the beginning. I fear I have made this sound better than it is.

MAD MONEY DIR. CALLIE KHOURI | RATED PG-13 | AT THEATERS  EVERYWHRE

Tags: Diane Keaton, Film, mad money, queen latifah