Mad Money (film)

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Mad Money
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Callie Khouri
Produced by	Jay Cohen
Written by	Glenn Gers
Starring	Diane Keaton Queen Latifah Katie Holmes Ted Danson
Music by	James Newton Howard Marty Davich
Cinematography	John Bailey
Editing by	Wendy Greene Bricmont
Distributed by	Overture Films
Release date(s)	January 18, 2008
Running time	126 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$22 million
Official website
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

Mad Money is a 2008 comedy-crime film starring Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah, and Katie Holmes, and directed by Callie Khouri.

==Plot==this is so bad The film begins close to the end of the story, when the suspects get caught and are interrogated. Then it flashes back to three years earlier and the film proceeds forward from there interspersed with occasional bits from the interrogation.

Three years before getting caught, Bridget (Diane Keaton) lived a comfortable upper class life until her husband Don (Ted Danson) was fired from his position and sunk into debt. The paycheck for Selina, the cleaning lady, bounces again. Selina confronts Bridget and suggests she take a job as a janitor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

On her first day on the job, Bridget hatches a scheme to steal damaged dollar bills slated for destruction. For her team she chooses Nina (Queen Latifah), who works the dollar bill shredder, and Jackie (Katie Holmes), who takes bill carts from the Secret Service room to the shredding room. It takes some work to convince Nina to join, but Jackie joins them quickly.

The plan is that in the Secret Service room Bridget will switch a carts official Master-brand lock with a near identical lock she purchased at Home Depot. Bridget will tell Jackie the cart number and give Nina the official lock. When Jackie gets the chosen cart, she dumps some bills from the cart into a trash can before taking the cart to Nina, who then uses Bridget's key to open it and restores the official lock, and then proceeds to shred the remaining bills. Meanwhile, Bridget, in the course of her janitorial duties, retrieves the dumped bills from the trash and splits them among Nina and Jackie in the women's restroom.

Their first robbery is a success though the take is not as big as they had hoped. However, they're emboldened to do it again and again. Once Don and Bridget pay off their debt, Don suggests they stop before they get caught. Bridget rejects this idea and convinces Nina and Jackie to keep going. They almost get caught but they fold in one of the cops.

A Federal Bank Examiner shows up at a party at Bridget's house, and the next day Bridget sees him at work. The Examiner confronts Glover (Stephen Root), who is unwilling to admit anyone has stolen a single bill out of his bank as a matter of professional pride. Tipped off, that night Bridget and her accomplices begin trying to get rid of all the loot stashed in their houses, but the cops move in before all the evidence is destroyed. Bridget escapes but the others get caught.

Bridget hires a tax attorney to defend them. The lawyer gets Bridget and all her accomplices off the hook for their crimes. However, the IRS demands they pay their taxes, which turn out to be equal in amount to the money that remains. They walk away free but penniless.

Eight months later, Bridget reveals to Nina and Jackie that she had stashed away a lot of the stolen money in the basement of a friend's bar.

1 Cast
2 Critical reception
3 Box office results
4 DVD release
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Cast

Diane Keaton as Bridget Cardigan
Queen Latifah as Nina Brewster
Katie Holmes as Jackie Truman
Ted Danson as Don Cardigan
Roger Cross as Barry
Stephen Root as Glover
J.C. MacKenzie as Mandelbrot
Christopher McDonald - Bryce Arbogast
Finesse Mitchell as Shaun

[edit] Critical reception

Mad Money received generally negative reviews to mixed reviews from film critics. As of January 21, 2008 on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has received a "rotten" rating of 20%, based on 93 reviews.^[1] On Metacritic, the film had an average score of 41 out of 100, based on 29 reviews.^[2]

Roger Ebert gave the film a rating of one and a half stars, and wrote, "The bottom line is, some girls will like it, the men not so much."^[3] The film also received one and a half stars in a review in the Chicago Tribune, and Michael Phillips wrote that the film's cast was not to blame: "Do not blame the cast. The cast is game. The dreary visual scheme, however, combines unwell with the pokey, enervated rhythm of the heist scenes, and while I'm neither a medical doctor nor a script doctor, it seems this film could use a few uppers."^[4]

The film received three stars in Newsday, and Jan Stuart wrote "Mad Money is no Rififi, but Khouri and Gers invest it with an individuality and generosity of spirit that lift it into the realm of guiltless pleasure."^[5] Bill Wine of All Headline News gave the film two and a half stars, writing "Mad Money is a light and lively, likable low-tech lark. Don't expect big laughs, but you can at least bank on it to hold your interest."^[6] The Canadian Press gave the film one and a half stars, and criticized Katie Holmes's performance "While Keaton has long done zany and giddy well, and she and Latifah have an interesting contrast of personalities, Holmes' presence feels like an afterthought."^[7] The New York Post, The New York Times and Variety also criticized Katie Holmes's performance in the film, and The New York Times called Holmes "the movie's weakest link."^[8]^[9]

In an article in the Boston Herald titled "Don't waste your Mad Money on poor comedy", Stephen Schaefer gave the film a rating of "C", writing "Even with the legendary Diane Keaton center stage, Mad Money fails to hit the stratosphere of giddy, intoxicating comedy."^[10] The film received a critical review in from Claudia Puig in USA Today "This lifeless comedy and uninventive caper feels as if it were cobbled together at a studio's obligatory consciousness-raising diversity seminar."^[11]

Many critics in the UK have stated that Mad Money is a carbon copy of the 2001 UK film Hot Money. The script from Mad Money matches large portions from that of Hot Money. Even some of the main characters' names are the same and have remained unchanged.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Box office results

The film debuted in fifth place at the box office on its opening day in the United States, with a return of USD$2.3 million from 2,470 screens.^[12]^[13] Reuters referred to this return as a "modest" result for the film's opening day.^[14] By the end of its opening weekend, Mad Money had slipped to seventh place, with a weekend take of $7.7 million.^[15]^[16] Writing for Rotten Tomatoes, Gitesh Pandya noted that the opening weekend per theater revenue "averaged a not-so-impressive $3,126."^[17] amNewYork called the film's opening weekend return "a big flop at the box office," and the New Zealand Herald described it as "a box-office flop".^[18]^[19] Richard Johnson of the New York Post wrote that the movie "bombed, debuting at an abysmal seventh place on the box-office charts."^[20] The film's four-day take was $9.2 million.^[21]^[18] The film also did not fare well in its release in other countries, and Conor Bresnan of Box Office Mojo reported that "Mad Money bombed in its first two markets" overseas.^[22] With an estimated budget of $22 million ^[23], the film had broken even by the time it came off theaters.^[24]