The Laundromat

Dir. Steven Soderbergh

95 Minutes

USA

2019

Starring: Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas, Melissa Rauch, David Schwimmer, Sharon Stone, James Cromwell, Jeffrey Wriggt, Matthias Schoenaerts, Nono Anomie

**/***** Steven Soderbergh's The Laundromat feels less of a movie and more a poorly melded compilation of vignettes, celebrity cameos, and interpolations, with a thin skewer of a narrative running through necessary just to keep the audience halfway interested. Following the death of her husband and friend in a boating accident that she survives, Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep) begins a personal investigation into the incident after an insurance fraud leaves her poorly compensated and feeling exploited. The film is peppered with a series of "fourth wall breaking" monologues with Antonio Banderas and Gary Oldman walking the viewer through the systems of legality that allow for such treachery to take place. Adding to this are scenes that exist solely to widen the lens with people like Will Forte, Chris Parnell, Larry Wilmore, David Schwimmer, among others, a hack job of casting where it does not feel like anyone involved with this film actually ever met anyone else in the ensemble before Soderbergh lazily hobbled together and called it a final cut. All of this is embedded with a faux-playfulness, interstitial animations, and "witty" titles cards in an attempt to keep the proceedings interesting, though portions come across as if Scott Z Burns watched The Big Short while reading about the Panama Papers scandal and thought "Yes, this is something that I can do something with". It all ends with a transcription from the "real-life whistleblower" of the events, spoken to the camera by Meryl Streep in a moment that needs to have some kind of punch to be at all effective, but the material leading up to it makes an already shaky scenario putter to an eye-rolling conclusion. This is a lousy piece of work that substitutes good intention for thoughtful craftsmanship, with not even a Soderbergh-ian experiment at least being the culprit for its laziness. ​October 2nd, 2019