Blog

BY MAGGIE SCOTT

Those who have been hit by the stock market plunge may want to attend “Mad Money” and take notes. Three ladies consider a scheme to personally “recycle” worn-out cash headed for a Federal Reserve Bank branch shredding machine and decide, “why not?”

Rescuing those grimy, torn Grants and Franklins ($50s and $100s) for another go around in the economy is the bright idea of Bridget Cardigan (Diane Keaton). Her degree in comparative literature hasn’t impressed many career counselors attempting to find Bridget a job that will help keep her and her unemployed husband Don (Ted Danson) from selling the house and pulling the kids out of college.

Scraping the bottom of the employment barrel, literally, Bridget finds herself pushing a cart loaded with cleaning supplies at the Kansas City bank where its lack of windows and plethora of cameras reminds at least one witty worker of a “Las Vegas casino without the fun.”

Catching a dose of larceny the minute she looks saucer-eyed at images on the bank of surveillance monitors of piles and piles of cash, Bridget infects shredder operator, Nina (Queen Latifah), a single mom, and money transporter, Jackie (Katie Holmes), with the burglary bug.

A tightly-wound head of security and one of his staff, who is nursing a not-so-secret crush on Nina, keep the girls on their toes as they inelegantly, but successfully, skim off thousands of dollars from the transport carts and leave work heavily padded with greenbacks.

For three years the operation involves nothing more sophisticated than switched padlocks and a waste can shielded from security cameras. With only occasional lapses of indulgence, the culprits refrain from spending their “dead presidents” and manage to fly under the radar. What they don’t anticipate is a visit by a bank examiner with the investigative tenacity of Gerard (who hounded “The Fugitive”).

With the law breathing down their necks, the perps realize they should have spent a little time devising an exit strategy.

With barbecue pit fired up, a trailer rigged to explode and a paper shredder balanced over a toilet, the crew zanily does its best to destroy the evidence…most of it. While this work from director Callie Khouri occasionally slumps into remake doldrums (its antecedent, a 2001 British TV movie), there are quite a few laugh-out-loud moments courtesy of Keaton, whose frenetic looniness jump starts more than one limp-along scene.

An Overture Films and Millenium Films release, rated PG-13 for sexual material, language and drug references.
.

Share on Facebook

Tweet

Follow us