It's a conspiracy! 'Money Monster' dips a toe in the murky waters of paranoia movies

"Not every conspiracy is a theory." So says the ominous tag line to Money Monster, the new thriller starring George Clooney as a TV host who slings Wall Street hype for the fictional Financial News Network. Clooney's Lee Gates is taken hostage on air by a bilked investor (Jack O'Connell) who bought Gates' bullish stance on a high-frequency trading company that just hemorrhaged $800 million. The investor wants answers. The company's slippery CEO can't be found. The official explanation, blaming a computer glitch, doesn't add up.

Who can be trusted? How high up does it all go? Who's really in charge here? Such questions earn Money Monster's membership in one of my favorite movie subgenres: the paranoid conspiracy thriller, in which -- wait for it -- everything is not as it seems. (Cue music designed for maximum dread and jitters.)

Conspiracy movies flower during periods of uncertainty, anger and hysterical fear -- emotions readily stoked in any election year. They play off societal frissons and mounting helplessness. Things are going badly, the thinking goes, and somebody, or some corporation, or government agency, or collusion of financial powers, must be hiding the real cause. Conspiracy theory allows our imagination to frolic in the fields of dark possibility.

No era has a monopoly on conspiracy thrillers; their appeal is as timeless as paranoia itself. But the subgenre's golden age was the '70s, when American filmmakers churned out a steady line of protagonists going up against far-reaching plots and nefarious, often invisible puppet masters.

You might remember the national mood. A pile of political assassinations lay at the country's blood-soaked feet. The findings of the Warren Report were widely doubted, even though Oliver Stone's conspiracy fantasia JFK was still a couple decades away. The Vietnam War spiraled out of control. Gas was getting expensive. And Watergate showed that crooked doings and cover-ups reached all the way to the White House.

The time was ripe for conspiracy fears, and filmmakers responded with a string of classic thrillers. The Parallax View gave us a shadowy school for political assassins -- or is it a school for political patsies? The Conversation brought Kafka to the surveillance age, as an emotionally detached bugging expert (Gene Hackman) went up against an elusive shot-caller known simply as the Director. Chinatown turned the very water we drink into a shark-infested river of treachery. And All the President's Men amped up the tension and paranoia of Woodward and Bernstein's shoe-leather hunt for Watergate facts. These movies and others, including Three Days of the Condor, Klute and even Jaws, gave us underdog heroes probing too close to hearts of darkness.

"You may think you know what you're dealing with," John Huston's Noah Cross tells Jack Nicholson's Jake Gittes in Chinatown, "but believe me, you don't." The fearsome old man's warning could apply to any of the conspiracy movie suckers playing a rigged game. These films put us on the side of the truth seeker, and they give us a stake in his or her often-futile quest. Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

If the conspiracy thriller has a patron saint it's Alan J. Pakula, who brought the paranoia in the '70s (The Parallax View, Klute), the '80s (Rollover) and the '90s (Presumed Innocent, The Pelican Brief). Pakula knew how to tap the zeitgeist and light and pace a film for creeping dread.

He died in a car crash on the Long Island Expressway in 1998. No conspiracy theories were offered. A car accident is generally just a car accident.

The fears exploited in Money Monster aren't too complicated. The big banks control our finances, and they hide their maneuvers behind obtuse terminology designed to confuse the average Joe. (See also The Big Short.) Money Monster's hostage taker snaps and starts demanding answers. He's the angry working-class white man of the 21st century, full of rage against the Wall Street machine. He's a timely combination of the fears buttressing the current election cycle's protest candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

But Money Monster, a competent and engaging thriller, serves more sizzle than steak on its conspiracy platter. The film's marketing plays up the conspiracy angle, from that tag line to the trailers, in which Clooney drops the ultimate conspiracy thriller line: "You have no idea how high this goes!" Ultimately, however, it doesn't go all that high, and the sense of mystery dissipates. Huh. Big banks are often run by bad people. Now there's a hot sports opinion.

Perhaps Money Monster is the perfect conspiracy thriller for the age in which everybody tries to know everything. The hostage drama plays out on live TV, where the increasingly popular famous-for-being-famous class spouts quick quips and opinions. At times, Money Monster seems more in tune with the media frenzy of Dog Day Afternoon than with the paranoia of its conspiracy brethren. It seems the revolution, like everything else, will now be televised.

Money Monster has its conspiracy bona fides, and it's eager to flaunt them. But this isn't quite like the bad old days of conspiracy movie glory, when the machinery of secrecy was enshrouded in enigmatic shadow, and you were never quite sure who was pulling the levers. There's something a little tidy about the new model, something that belies the fact that conspiracy, even when it works, is a messy business.