Columbia Pictures, Annapurna Pictures, Atlas Entertainment,
Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Jennifer Lawrence, Louis C.K., Jack Huston, Michael Peña, Shea Whigham, Alessandro Nivola, Elisabeth Röhm, Paul Herman, Saïd Taghmaoui, Matthew Russell, Thomas Matthews, Adrian Martinez, Anthony Zerbe, Colleen Camp
The story of Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and a fictionalized account of the early 1980’s ABSCAM scandal. Rosenfeld is a crook and a con man, but he’s roped into to trapping some government officials into bribery and crime with the help of a fake sheik and a bunch of other characters.
I can remember hearing about the ABSCAM scandals back in the day. It was New Jersey and Pennsylvania where it happened, and it involved hours and hours of secretly filmed meeting with congressional leaders and the like. It seemed to fill the news, but truthfully I was never really caught up in the real story. This film has a great array of wonderful stars. But like the real story, this movie just didn’t catch me. I wasn’t impressed with the performance of any of the actors, and it all was mostly boring to me. This film received a lot of buzz in awards season last year, probably mostly because of the dream cast, but I just couldn’t get into the story and found myself daydreaming away. Nothing really jumped out and caught me, and I was not roped in. It just was a waste of time. I really didn’t enjoy it very much, and as a result, I didn’t get much out of the story. Afterward I decided to research the ABSCAM scandal to see if I could make some sense out of the movie, and quit reading half way through the article too. This is a missed opportunity in my humble opinion, and it just did not reach out to me. I could have skipped this one.
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