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The biggest problem with All the Money in the World is that its anchoring presence, that of billionaire J. Paul Getty, is just not interesting enough as presented here. He’s clearly meant to a figure of mythological proportions, and Christopher Plummer is valiantly trying to play him as such, but the rest of the film is lacking a certain something about it to really sell this idea. Perhaps its leftover messiness from having to quickly reshoot so much of it, or maybe it’s just that this was always a heavily manufactured affair with clear examples of artistic liberty taken with the material.
Then there’s the main problem of Mark Wahlberg. All the Money in the World is a three-legged beast that depends on the performances of all three main actors to work properly, and two of them are doing a great job. Wahlberg is a perfectly fine comedic actor, but he’s shown time and time again that he’s limited in dramatic roles. This feels outside of his range of emotive capabilities as his biggest choice to display seriousness is whether or not he removes his glasses. Michelle Williams and Plummer outgun him, and the delicate balancing act necessary for some scenes are thrown off by his stilted line readings and frowning serious face.
There’s also the problem of the repetitive nature of a large chunk of the film. We get so many false leads, hysteric crying phone calls, negotiations, and near misses that you can guess the exact structure of the next several scenes before they’ve even finished, or started. Things play out almost as caricatures, of icy wealth, of band of brothers criminals, of a ferocious mother, that you lose any real emotion or complexity to the narrative. All the Money in the World just becomes another handsomely made but inert Ridley Scott film, and we’ve been getting an awful lot of those lately.
