Near-Future Wall Street Hacker Thriller ‘The Crash’ Isn’t Too Big to Fail

Set exactly one year after the 2016 presidential election, Aram Rappaport’s thriller The Crash shows the U.S. on the brink of a Wall Street cyber attack. Now it’s up to a corporate swindler to save the day with his crack team of hackers so he can leave a nasty indictment behind.

There’s plenty of talent here — Frank Grillo, John Leguizamo, Maggie Q, Ed Westwick, Dianna Agron, AnnaSophia Robb — but it’s overshadowed by a convoluted counter-hacking scheme, nauseating shaky cam and whooshing computer animations apparently meant to make everything clearer. (They don’t.) Minnie Driver stands out as the single-best part, playing a sarcastic, determined head of a nonprofit whose stake here is twofold.

Of the many disheartening things about The Crash — a script filled with platitudes, casting an able-bodied actor as a wheelchair-bound tech expert, near-criminal underuse of Maggie Q — the worst is its habit of slapping the audience over the head with symbolism, even suggesting that Madame President Clinton’s government might have a hand in this mess. Hell, the Chair of the Federal Reserve is named Richard Del Banco, which translates to “bank” in Spanish, and you can bet that’s not a coincidence. We get it, crooked Shillary’s in a money tree with the big banks, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

If you played a drinking game based around every time “fail” is said — as in actual movie quote “‘Too big to fail’ is a thing of the past” — you’d be under the table quicker than a shady finance deal…but you might also have a better time. Too bad The Crash lives up to its inauspicious name.

The Crash

Directed by Aram Rappaport

Vertical Entertainment

Opens January 13, Cinema Village