423: The Laundromat

[00:00:00] 130. Let's get to The Laundromat, which is a Netflix original and it's the fourth of seven Steven Soderbergh films I'm talking about. Along with being done by Soderbergh of course, it's written by Scott Z. Burns who also wrote the scripts

[00:00:16] for Contagion, Side Effects, and The Informant, which are three of my all-time favorite Soderbergh movies. And it stars Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas, A.J. Maher, Meryl Streep, James Cromwell, J. Paulson, Melissa Rauch, and a few others. And the

[00:00:37] synopsis is, a widow investigates an insurance fraud. Chasing leads to a pair of Panama City law partner exploiting the world's financial system. So when this one came out I was curious because as I said Scott Z. Burns and Steven Soderbergh

[00:00:55] I think do some of their best work when they're together and I always really really like Burns's scripts because there's a lot of detail, a lot of research, and they're usually very important stories I think in one way or

[00:01:06] the other. And I love Meryl Streep so this movie was right in my wheelhouse but I actually only got around to seeing it just this past week. And going into it I had heard kind of mixed things, not-so-great things. People said it was

[00:01:20] kind of a disappointment with everybody involved. And this was his first movie since Logan Lucky that was not shot on an iPhone so it's more standard I guess you could say. And I think overall the movie is okay. It's pretty disappointed

[00:01:36] as I think many were, at least on Letterboxd I saw pretty negative to mixed reviews. I think that I appreciate the story. It's you know very much in the Scott Z. Burns, Soderbergh, expose sort of style. But for whatever reason maybe

[00:01:54] it's the book that was based on or just maybe Netflix getting involved I don't know. But it felt very unfocused, very sort of lazy I think in how they express certain ideas, certain bits of information. And it is by far my least

[00:02:10] favorite of their collaborations. It's not horrible but it really is a waste of not only the story itself but of Meryl Streep and everybody involved I think. It's entertaining enough. It's not too long. It's 90 minutes I think but it felt

[00:02:25] just so random and all over the place with what stories they're telling, how things connected to what. I really started to lose track of alright why are we watching these people now? Is this gonna come back around? Is this just like a

[00:02:38] one-off little vignette? That's actually one thing is it really felt like a series of weird random vignettes of these different stories, financial stories around the world and they didn't really have that much cohesion at all. Which is very weird for Soderbergh and Burns. I feel like they

[00:02:56] have a pretty good grasp on keeping everything kind of relative. So I don't know exactly what went wrong there. And one of my biggest issues, and it just got worse as the movie went along, I love Gary Oldman and I love Antonio Banderas.

[00:03:13] But there, just in general personally, maybe I'm in the minority, I don't know. I really 99% of the time I do not like fourth wall narrators. I don't really like someone walking around on screen talking to the camera about

[00:03:29] what's going on. Like little bits and pieces like for example in Wolf of Wall Street. It's used very minimally and I think that works. But in this I felt like the third act was almost entirely just Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas

[00:03:46] talking to the camera about all the things that have happened and why this makes sense. Why people are getting away with what and all that stuff. I felt like it was just after a while we were just sitting there watching them talk to us.

[00:03:59] It wasn't even a real scene. It just felt like they kind of gave up trying to figure out, alright how can we express all of these ideas and plot points and real-life events and they just ended up doing a fourth wall narration for like

[00:04:14] the whole third act. So really did not like that. Way overused in that and even at the beginning it felt very lazy and like they could have been a lot more creative with expressing those ideas and even thinking about something like the

[00:04:29] big short. That's really in the same sort of ballpark in some ways like financial scams and all that stuff but there's way more variety and cohesion to how they expressed all of those ideas and I felt like I followed it more. In this I felt

[00:04:45] like I just was not keeping up with anything that those two guys were saying about the real-world events and everything we shouldn't know and need to know. So I don't think it's you know it would probably be my least favorite of

[00:04:59] all the movies I'm talking about in this group. Probably my least favorite Soderbergh in a while to be real but I don't think it's as bad as people say. It still has some good intentions, a good cast. I do like the final scene with

[00:05:14] Meryl Streep and there is a fourth wall narration but I think the twist or who she turns into at the very end with the wardrobe and hairstyle change I think that's pretty clever and then also the reveal which doesn't really make sense

[00:05:31] of her placement in the story and then who she turns out to be. I don't want to spoil it too much because I guess it is a somewhat of a twist but that didn't

[00:05:42] really make sense to me in terms of who she interacts with in the movie and then who she turns out to be later. I don't know if I just missed something but that was a little confusing. One of the only really like inspired moments was there's

[00:05:56] a scene with a shotgun that I thought was hilarious and so that's something that really felt inspired but for the most part it glides along. It's okay, it's watchable, it's just a Netflix original. Feels very Netflix-y in a lot of ways

[00:06:09] for better and for worse. So yeah not one I really feel the need to go back to anytime soon. If you like Meryl Streep, if you like Soderbergh and you're desperate give it a look. You could do worse but not an amazing movie by any

[00:06:22] means. So that one is a 3 out of 5.