Equity (3/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 100 minutes.

Not for children.

This is probably the first Wall Street chick flick and it is hard to watch. All the men in the movie are bad guys. Most of the women are, too. It’s written (Amy Fox and Sarah Megan Thomas, who gets a story by credit) and directed (Meera Menon) by women and just in case anyone doesn’t notice, one of the final lines in the movie is a paean to women’s lib; coming across with as preachy a line as you will ever hear in a motion picture.

Naomi Bishop (Anna Gunn) is an investment banker experienced in putting together IPOs. She has an assistant, Erin Manning (Thomas) who is less than loyal. Worse, she’s got an old college friend, Samantha Ryan (Alysia Reiner, who is a co-producer), who is also a federal prosecutor. Her sometime boyfriend is Michael Connor (James Purefoy), who is also an investment banker with her firm. Then there’s the wunderkind CEO of the company Naomi is representing, Ed (Samuel Roukin), who is really a piece of work.

Naomi is the only person in the film who is pure. The rest of them are ambitious, back-stabbing, Machiavellian villains, and that’s what the film is about.

This isn’t a bad story. The problem with the film is that it’s just not polished. There are scenes in it that make you feel you are watching a bunch of actors mouthing words. One scene in which Ryan comes on to a target in a bar to try to get information out of him is so contrived it’s cringworthy. When you see a scene like this you can’t really tell whether it’s bad acting or bad writing or bad directing. Here it’s probably all three. I see lots and lots of movies but I can’t remember any scene as bad as this one is.

As far as verisimilitude goes, this gets a D, but on the plus side, it definitely does not have a Hollywood Ending.

It advertises itself as a film that is “directed, written, produced, and financed by women, a collaboration among women in entertainment and business leaders in finance—the real life women of Wall Street—who chose to invest in  this film because they wanted to see this story told.” Given the quality of the result, I won’t be investing in any of their IPOs.