Movie review: 'Mad Money'

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1 1/2 stars (out of four)

Diane Keaton—now there’s a trouper for you. She will not be caught giving less than 110 percent, even in a drab little heist comedy.

“Mad Money,” based on a 2001 feature, “Hot Money,” made for British television, casts Keaton as Bridget, a cash-strapped Kansas City woman whose unemployed husband (Ted Danson) has devolved into a burbling blob of uselessness after being let go from his “stupid multinational corporation.” With the wolf at the door—why they don’t sell their mansion is barely discussed—Bridget lands a cleaning job at the local Federal Reserve Bank. There she conspires with two workers, a single mother of two (Queen Latifah) and an apparent junkie (Katie Holmes, giving it approximately 160 percent), on a scheme to purloin stacks of distressed bills earmarked for destruction.

Speaking of recycling, this script by Glenn Gers reeks of it and not in a healthy, eco-minded way. I haven’t seen the original British version, but “Mad Money,” shot in and around Shreveport, La., putters along with a fatally dutiful air. The heist itself is dully ordinary. Director Callie Khouri, who wrote “Thelma & Louise” in more Oscar-bound days, is required to treat the material half-seriously (the single mother’s custody issues) and half farcically (by Keaton and Danson’s twitty, panicky predicament). In scenes where Keaton, skulking around the Fed, is supposed to be surveying the layout as inconspicuously as possible, the actress cannot help but mug up a storm. There’s one good verbal gag early on, involving a drug test. One. I’d repeat it, but then you’d have no jokes waiting for you.

Do not blame the cast. The cast is game. The dreary visual scheme, however, combines unwell with the pokey, enervated rhythm of the heist scenes, and while I’m neither a medical doctor nor a script doctor, it seems this film could use a few uppers. It is relaxed to the point of conking out altogether, and you may find your mind drifting back to squishy feminism-for-dummies romps of yore, such as “How to Beat the High Co$t of Living.” Just like Susan Saint James, Jane Curtin and Jessica Lange in the poster for that movie, Keaton, Latifah and Holmes look like they’re having the time of their lives in the poster for “Mad Money.” Sometimes advertising can be so deceptive!

mjphillips@tribune.com

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