In an odd sort of way, period drama-thriller All The Money In The World is also fascinated by people who look like us, but have something decidedly inhuman running through their veins. For most of us, money is just something we need to pay the bills and buy sandwiches. For people like John Paul Getty, in the 1970s the richest man in the world, it’s his lifeblood: certainly more important than passing whims like friends, family, or a little thing like paying taxes. So begins a gripping and macabre bout of detective work and deal-making, with Gail shuttling between her father-in-law, the Italian police and the kidnappers, who ring up at ungodly hours with their latest set of demands. Ridley Scott keeps things moving at the pace of a page-turning crime novel, the tone veering from the blood-curdling to the blackly comic. There’s one early scene where we’re half led to think that Getty Sr (a perfectly surly Christopher Plummer) is about to relent and cough up the ransom money; instead, he’s negotiating over the price of an old oil painting. To Getty, things – and getting a good deal for those things – is of infinitely more importance than people, which is something of a sticking point when he’s met with Italy’s criminal fraternity, where Paul (Charlie Plummer) is essentially treated like another commodity. A few weeks ago, the run-up to All The Money In The World’s release was overshadowed somewhat by news that, in the wake of allegations of sexual assault, actor Kevin Spacey was being replaced at the last minute by Plummer. On the face of it, staging some late reshoots might not sound like much, but Plummer’s role in the piece is far more than a walk-on part – and it’s a testament to the skill of Scott, Plummer and his team of filmmakers that this eleventh-hour retooling hasn’t made an obvious impact on the movie. Mark Wahlberg, in a supporting role, is somewhere in the middle as Fletcher Chace, a former CIA agent who’s now Getty’s security guy and well-paid lapdog. Chace likes making deals and driving his Jensen Interceptor (one of many pleasing 70s details Scott and production designer Arthur Max casually thread in), but it’s through Gail, as he starts working with her to get her son back, that Chace’s moral pendulum begins to swing away from his boss’s coldness and towards something approaching a decent human being. Scott invests each scene with his smokey, defuse light, but he’s careful to let the story just motor along rather than get bogged down in showy filmmaking tricks. As well as an eye for visuals, Scott has a nose for the outlandish and the shocking – it’s there in his infamous chestbursting sequence in Alien, of course, but it can also be found in his more recent movies, too, like the eccentric characters in his flawed but fascinating The Counsellor, or the grisly seven plagues of his biblical epic, Exodus. Scott is never happier, it seems, than when he’s exploring the gorier details of a kidnapper’s ransom demands or the delicious irony of an old miser who cares more about a painting of a mother and child than the real mother and son suffering in his midst. All The Money In The World is out in UK cinemas on the 26th December.
title: “All The Money In The World Review” ShowToc: true date: “2025-08-02” author: “Christa Howery”
Acting quickly, he arranged for the great Canadian actor Christopher Plummer (reportedly his original choice anyway) to replace Spacey and moved forward with reshooting every single scene involving the elder Getty, a seemingly Herculean task involving going back to locations, revisiting sets and rounding up crew and other cast members. Within perhaps the last three weeks, the 80-year-old Scott reshot a substantial portion of footage and re-edited it into the movie (his second of the year, by the way, after Alien: Covenant) in time for the press and public to see it more or less when they were supposed to. Then Paul is kidnapped, taken right off the street and flung into a van by a gang of low-level hoods and would-be revolutionaries who end up selling their victim to a larger (and more anonymous) Mafia operation, with one of them (Romain Duris) becoming a semi-sympathetic protector to Paul. The ransom is set at $17 million and Abigail heads to London to see about getting it from her former father-in-law. But she’s barely set foot in Blighty when the old man tells the press in no uncertain terms that he won’t pay it, ostensibly because that would set a bad precedent for anyone thinking of absconding with one or more of his 13 other grandchildren. The truth of the matter is that Getty is the skinflint to end all skinflints, and Plummer captures the man’s monstrous inability to see past the end of his balance sheet with a mix of cold calculation and reptilian stillness. Content to wash his own clothes in a hotel room rather than tip the maid service for doing it, he’s also perfectly happy to let his grandson rot somewhere in Italy (and lose a body part in one viciously nasty sequence) while instead sending his ex-CIA fixer Fletcher Chace (Mark Wahlberg, who’s good but we suspect is playing a role that’s been beefed up considerably for its part in the narrative) to track down his heir’s whereabouts — as long as Chace stays within a reasonable budget. The clash between Gail and Getty is the best aspect of All the Money in the World, and fortunately Williams and Plummer are more than up to the challenge; it’s difficult to imagine Spacey embodying the role of Getty as well as Plummer does. So much more of the film’s two hour-plus running time — taken up by repetitive check-ins with little Paul’s jailers and Chace’s investigation — is well done and polished to a fine (if somberly lit) gloss by Scott, yet ends up contributing little to the narrative. As the movie grinds through its increasingly labored and unrealistic second half (which features some highly fictionalized remixes of actual events by screenwriter David Scarpa), whatever message it seems to be striving for gets lost. All the Money in the World is not Scott at his superficial worst, but it’s also far from him at his epic and most meaningful best. It’s stylish, impeccably designed and performed with precision. A lot of money in a very small amount of time went into saving the film from complete commercial failure and disrepute, an incredible achievement on its own terms. But all the money in the world — to borrow a phrase — can’t save it from generating little in the way of real passion.
