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