The Laundromat review: Steven Soderbergh's attempt to skewer the super wealthy is too lightweight to do them any real damage

Dir: Steven Soderbergh; Starring Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas, Meryl Streep. Cert TBC, 96 mins

Corruption, bribery and money laundering are the stuff of high camp in Steven Soderbergh’s breezy new film, The Laundromat. It is adapted from the book, Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite, by Jake Bernstein.

The director’s approach to his esoteric source material is original. This is not some earnest Panorama-style exposé of financial skullduggery. Nor is it a dark gangster movie. Instead, it’s a revue-style farce which laughs at the venality and cheap cunning of notorious law firm and offshore financial services company Mossack Fonseca and its shady list of clients all over the world.

Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas, dressed like ageing lounge lizards, are cast as Mossack and Fonseca. Oldman plays his role with a bizarre Germanic accent reminiscent of that of Werner Herzog. Banderas is marginally more restrained as Fonseca. They act as narrators, hosts and ultimately as the villains of the story. They link the various chapters in which we see raw, naked greed in action all over the world.

Soderbergh’s aim is to lift the veil concealing the “secret life of money.” He deals with complex subject matter in a clear and light hearted way. However, the events depicted here are frequently brutal. As Banderas’ Fonseca puts it, “for someone to win, someone has to lose.” Characters who realise they are being swindled and betrayed have that same baffled look as the victims of spoofs in Candid Camera-style TV shows. They just can’t understand how they have been hoodwinked. Behind all the scams, smirking and goofing, are Mr Mossack and Mr Fonseca.

Soderbergh’s storytelling style is jaunty and fast moving. The money is whizzing around the world so quickly that nobody, sometimes not even Mossack and Fonseca themselves, knows where it is going. The film has the feel of one of its director’s Ocean’s Eleven-style capers but the difference here is that the heist is being committed on a global scale.

The drawback to Soderbergh’s approach is that The Laundromat risks becoming flippant and facetious, and of understating the wrongdoings of its many crooked protagonists. The director has brilliant actors at his disposal but doesn’t give any of them proper characters to play.

Although Oldman’s antics are amusing enough, he is only at half throttle. This is a sketch, not one of those uncanny performances like his Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour or his George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in which he gets under the skin of his characters. It’s hard to see what purpose it serves having him and Banderas talking directly to camera as they wheel a trolley through a supermarket.

Meryl Streep is unlikely to add to her hoard of Oscars with her quirky turn as a grief-stricken senior citizen. She plays Ellen Martin, a woman who goes on a boating trip with her elderly husband. There is a freak accident. The boat capsizes. The boat’s owners don’t have proper insurance because they have been mis-sold a policy. The bereaved Martin’s dogged investigations as to who is really responsible take her on a circuitous journey which leads her eventually towards Mossack Fonsca.

The Laundromat has little chance of being shown in China. The censors there are unlikely to look at all favourably on its jokey recreation of the Bo Xilai corruption scandal. Soderbergh shows Bo Xilai’s wife ruthlessly dealing with a heavy drinking British businessman (Matthias Schoenaerts) who has the temerity to try to blackmail her.

Another episode deals with a fantastically brazen and corrupt African politician (Nonso Anozie) who has an affair with his daughter’s best friend. “How much?” is always his first question whenever he gets caught cheating. Generally, people take his bribes. He cheerily swindles everyone including members of his own family.

Jeffrey Wright is in enjoyably hangdog form as the small-time Caribbean lawyer who turns out to be a vital cog in the Mossack Fonseca money churning machine. While Oldman and Banderas are flamboyant, Wright is very downbeat. He represents corruption at its most seedy and banal. Sharon Stone has a cameo as a Las Vegas estate agent who has no compunctions about betraying her clients or dealing with buyers whose money comes from the shadiest sources.

It is very hard to tell which parts of the film are fictional and which are based on fact. There is a fleeting reference late on to David Cameron, one of the many powerful global figures caught up in the Panama Papers scandal. An intertitle at the beginning reminds that much of what we are about to see actually happened. Soderbergh is clearly trying to skewer the super-wealthy but the satire here is too lightweight to do them any real damage.

The Laundromat is out now