After her affluent husband Don (Ted Danson) is laid off from his high-paying job, bourgeois suburbanite Bridget (Diane Keaton) takes a job as a janitor at the local Kansas City Federal Reserve in order to help the married couple make ends meet. But she quickly grows tired of this daily grind (and even more upset at having to forgo all of life’s simple budget-busting pleasures) and soon comes up with a foolproof plan to make some extra cash no one would ever suspect of having gone missing.

Queen Latifah, Diane Keaton and Katie Holmes in Overture Films' Mad Money

Teaming up with new friends single mother of two Nina (Queen Latifah) and eccentric free spirit Jackie (Katie Holmes), the trio conspire to steal from their government employer, the catch being they only grab from the overflowing bins of old money scheduled to be destroyed. It’s perfect, and thanks to the sound financial advice of Don nothing could possibly go wrong.

But nothing lasts forever, and soon the IRS starts wondering how these three survive so beyond their respective means. Suddenly the women are under an intense microscope, trying to hide mass sums of cash in places too implausible to believe. With the police closing in and their nitpicky boss Glover (Stephen Root) breathing down their necks all seems lost. Yet Bridget remains completely undaunted, and before all is said and done she’ll hatch a new plan hopefully ensuring none of them will ever have to worry about seeing the inside of a prison cell.

Mad Money is the atypical January movie. It has a great cast, a cute storyline and no one would ever come out of the theater claiming to have hated it. Problem is, they’re not going to say they liked it, either. The film is a total misfire, never living up to its potential and only maintaining a modicum of pleasantly diverting momentum thanks to the three actresses fronting it. It is completely (and instantaneously) forgettable, and by the time February comes around I’m almost positive no one is even going to remember it existed.

The problems here are two-fold starting with the script. Writer Glen Gers (Fracture) gets the credit but apparently he wasn’t the first scribe to take a whack at the storyline and it definitely shows (the film is a remake of a supposedly wonderful British television flick). The plot is a hodgepodge of ideas grab-bagged from countless other comedic heist pictures. There is no style to it, no wit to any of the criminal proceedings, and while a joke here or there connects the majority fall so flat they might as well be made out of tissue paper.

As for the direction, the less I probably say about what Callie Khouri (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood) accomplishes is probably for the better. Let me just say her pacing borders on the anemic, scenes played out to such an interminable length they feel as if the last for centuries. What she and her editor Wendy Greene Bricmont (I Think I Love My Wife) do is borderline inexcusable, the two of them draining all the life out of the picture and replacing it with an unhealthy dose of maudlin pomposity it definitely doesn’t deserve.

Still, there are a couple of simple pleasures if one chooses to look hard enough. I liked how fearless Keaton is as Bridget, almost reveling in the fact her character is so completely reprehensible and yet somehow manages to keep the woman totally endearing. Even better are Latifah and Holmes, the latter almost a minor revelation delivering a completely skuzzy and totally whacked-out performance I never dreamt her capable of unleashing. 

None of this is enough, of course, Mad Money not worth any one of the dollars at the box office it would cost to view it. And yet, like I already said, I can’t imagine anyone working up the energy to actually hate the thing. Heck, if it was on late night cable television and I had nothing better to do even I might find myself lazily watching the movie again. Granted, that’s probably pushing it, but I’m sure you still get my meaning.

Film Rating: êê  (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  Mad Money Theatrical Trailer