Fans of the politically charged Costa-Gavras thrillers “Z” and “Missing” had best avoid the 80-year-old director’s second-rate new thriller, France’s “Capital.”
Gad Elmaleh plays a French Gordon Gekko who schemes his way into the CEO chair of a multinational bank, then presents himself to the public as a man of the people while secretly negotiating to be paid thousands for every worker he fires.
Gabriel Byrne is the US-based hedge fund manager who tries to lure the banker into a fatal mistake.
Elmaleh’s one-note performance — he plays virtually every scene with the same supercilious-jerk look pasted on his face — is well-suited to the trite and on-the-nose script, which essentially reduces the rest of the cast to being awed by the CEO’s various double-crosses.
To the extent the movie has a political angle, it’s a sort of fourth-grade Marxism that compares banking to the Mafia and shows the suits standing up and cheering when their boss promises to rob the poor to pay the rich.