You might be asking yourself “what is Arbitrage?” and to answer your question, I don’t really know. I looked up the definition and it’s some financial term that I didn’t really understand, but I assume it has some philosophical relationship to the ideas in the movie.
Arbitrary stars Richard Gere as a financial guy who’s so rich he doesn’t even know what an Applebee’s is. He’s got everything, money, butlers, but it all comes crashing down around him when his mistress is murdered while the car he was driving mysteriously flips over and then suddenly explodes. There’s also some shady financial deals going on to remind you this guy is rich and to make you feel stupid by throwing all kinds of big words at you like money, withdrawal, and missing.
Since Lawless was a big letdown, Arbitrable really is the first awards worthy movie. The movie won’t win any best picture awards, but hopefully some of the cast will get recognized. Everyone keeps raving about Richard Gere, and while he is good in it, I think Tim Roth delivers a better performance as a worn out detective who knows that Gere’s character arbitrarily manslaughtered his mistress, he’s just looking for the right piece of evidence to bust him.
The movie is kind of interesting because none of the characters in Arbitrageur are innocent. Even the cops, who are trying to do the right thing, try to pin the crime on Gere by fabricating evidence.
There are several flaws contained in Arbalist. Gere’s character had a financial gamble go awry and even though it plays a central role in the movie it never bears any consequence. Even when the person he’s trying to bury it on finds out, he flat-out doesn’t give a shrim. He even continues the deal. But again, they were throwing a lot of big words around so maybe people who work at banks will understand that one. I also felt like Roth’s character didn’t apply enough pressure on Gere’s. I mean, he only talked to the guy once. They could have at least thrown in a couple of other scenes where they run into each other and Roth could have said “I know it was you, I’m coming for you.” That was a good line.
All in all Arbuckle doesn’t stack up to other financially themed movies like Wallstreet or Margin Call, which is an extremely tense movie that almost no one has heard of that I suggest you check out, but it does deliver some tense scenes itself and is worth checking out.
6 out of 11
Check out the trailer below:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waORywYAG7Q&w=560&h=315]
Watcher of movies. Writer of books. I love doing both and sometimes I even write about movies. Follow me on Twitter so you can keep track of my boring and uninteresting life @redsixx.
