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Schlock market

Susan Sarandon and Richard Gere look like they’d rather be elsewhere.

Susan Sarandon and Richard Gere look like they’d rather be elsewhere.

According to all these Wall Street movies, it seems that some of these financial wizards may not be strictly on the level. A hedge-fund whiz (Richard Gere) in “Arbitrage” is in the process of selling a firm that’s carrying $400 million worth of phony assets. Yet he continues to push brazenly forward, like a guy planning to bring his fiancée to dinner with his parents without mentioning that she’s a blow-up doll.

“Arbitrage” is a decent enough way to spend your time compared to, say, waiting on line at the grocery story. But why grade on a curve? Every episode of “Law & Order” I’ve ever seen has a more complicated and plausible plot, punchier dialogue and more New York authenticity, all in less than half the time consumed by this poky would-be finance thriller. And as for that so-called Oscar buzz for Mr. Gere, allow me to apply a little buzzicidal ointment. Clint Eastwood’s chair has a better shot at an Oscar nomination. So-so actors don’t get nominated for forgettable movies. Unless Harvey Weinstein is backing them.

PHOTOS: ‘ARBITRAGE’ PREMIERES IN NEW YORK

Gere plays a professional investor who is supposed to make us think of Bernie Madoff because he has silver hair and employs family members in his firm, which is heading for disaster unless he can sell it to a fellow shark (amusingly played in a cameo by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter). His daughter and chief investment officer (Brit Marling, who looks nothing like Gere or the woman playing her mom, Susan Sarandon) adores her dad but can’t quite ignore the scent of rotted carp coming off the company’s accounts — though the wife is awfully incurious when Robert (Gere) disappears one night and returns with unexplained injuries.

Robert has a personal life that’s as sordid as his professional one, and even if he doesn’t get 1,000 years for financial fraud, he could get jailed for manslaughter. It’ll take heavy assistance from a former employee’s son (Nate Parker), who owes Robert some favors, to stay ahead of a cop (Tim Roth) nosing around just as the merger is about to go through.

I’m not sure any five pages of this script by director Nicholas Jarecki hold together. We’re meant to believe that if Robert can get the other CEO’s signature on a deal he’ll be free and clear, but I doubt that it’s SEC policy to forgive massive corporate fraud by anyone who can find another sucker to buy his company.

Much discussion in the manslaughter case revolves around whether someone drove from Harlem to upstate New York via the Triborough Bridge, which would be a bit like going from Dallas to Chicago by way of Atlanta. And Robert catches a lucky break when he hits a dead spot in rural New York that renders his phone temporarily untraceable. Unfortunately for Jarecki, mentioning this simply raises the point that Robert’s cellphone would have been traceable the rest of the evening, including during the entire journey out of the city and on a trip to a girlfriend’s home. Nor would a New York detective be dumb enough to fabricate evidence on a case he was already winning.

So the best you can say about the movie is that it pops along with bits of intrigue and a few surprises. Roth certainly seems to be enjoying himself, slouching and sneering and spewing Noo Yawk inflections that only an Englishman would even attempt anymore. Carter also shows spark, playing the rival financier with a mix of the jovial and the sinister. Sarandon’s role, though, is underwritten, and when she finally gets a big scene that’s meant to reverse our opinion of her character, it has no effect because we were never given a reason to form an opinion of her in the first place.

Even fascinating characters wouldn’t have saved this story, though. How rich the soil, yet how meager the produce. The movie isn’t even about arbitrage: The title was simply chosen because it sounds kind of finance-y. I can hear filmmakers protesting, “Wall Street is really complicated and abstruse — you try dramatizing it.” But that should be an asset, shouldn’t it? Figure out how it works, show us, throw in some blondes and cocaine and a murder, you’ve got a movie. (Leave out the latter three and you could still have a great story just by explaining the machinery, as in Michael Lewis’ book “The Big Short.”)

But the filmmakers themselves don’t understand how Wall Street works, so they simply bluff and cut corners and hope no one will notice. As with most varieties of insistent ignorance, The Onion nailed the tendency to place outrage before comprehension in a single headline: “Neither person in conversation knows what hedge fund is.”