“Oh, fuck the rules, Tony. It’s barrow boys like Nick who are turning the City of London around. You can’t run a modern financial centre with a bunch of Hooray Henries.” – Ron Baker I saw this movie back in 1999 and generally liked it but I hadn’t seen it since then and after recently revisiting the Wall Street movies, I wondered how well this one would hold up over two decades later. For the most part, it’s pretty good and I thought that Ewan McGregor did well with the material, bringing a real energy to the film, which on it’s own, would’ve been really mundane without him. Point being, McGregor is so good that it makes this a better picture than it should have been and he carries the rest of the cast in every scene. But honestly, that’s okay, as the end result worked and you cared enough about him and his situation that you wanted to see this all play out. From a production standpoint, the cinematography, camera work and overall look of the picture feels cheap. If I’m being honest, this feels like more of a TV movie than a theatrical one, which is probably why it debuted on television in the US market where it saw theatrical releases overseas. When compared to films like Wall Street 1 and 2, The Wolf of Wall Street and the grossly underrated Boiler Room, this doesn’t hold a candle to them. Like The Wolf of Wall Street, though, this one is a true story and it’s an interesting enough story deserving of being told in the motion picture medium. However, the story probably deserves a better movie than what this turned out to be. The real story is fascinating and I don’t think that it really came through, here. Still, this is good and it’s certainly worth checking out for Ewan McGregor and the part that he played quite greatly.  Genre: Biographical Drama Director: James Dearden Starring: Ewan McGregor, Anna Friel Running Time: 101 minutes Synopsis: Despite a humble working class background, Nick Leeson (Ewan McGregor) has ambitions to become a financial trader at the distinguished London-based Barings Bank. After making his name in Jakarta and marrying Lisa (Anna Friel), he lands a position running the bank's futures trading desk in Singapore. Barely supervised, Nick takes big risks and covers his losses with illegal transactions, creating the illusion of huge profits. He is deemed a superstar as his financial deceptions grow to gargantuan levels. What Works Well: Director and writer James Dearden, adapting the book co-authored by Leeson, captures a culture quick to abandon checks-and-balances in the rush to celebrate profits and big bonuses. The manic energy of the trading floor sustains the up-and-down dramas of financial transactions. What Does Not Work As Well: More a chronicling of facts than an attempt to understand people, the film stalls in simplistic characterizations and is unable to progress beyond initial definitions. Nick is a particularly unlikeable liar and rule-bender who never seems to know when to stop digging a deeper hole. Opportunities to more meaningfully explore addictive personalities entrapped by the lure of wealth are well beyond the grasp of the elemental script. Sorry, we just need to make sure you're not a robot. For best results, please make sure your browser is accepting cookies. Type the characters you see in this image:Try different image Conditions of Use Privacy Policy © 1996-2014, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates Every week there seems to be at least one new British film to remind us of Franois Truffaut's observation that "There's something about England that's anti-cinematic." Even seemingly foolproof material gets the silk-purse-into-sow's-ear treatment. It's the sort of Midas-in-reverse touch that Nick Leeson demonstrated when he single-handedly destroyed his employers, Barings Bank, by running up debts of more than pounds 800 billion on the Singapore stock exchange. This modern moral fable sounds tailor-made for the big screen. It could have been a top-hole farce or tragedy, romance or thriller. Unfortunately James Dearden, who wrote and directed Rogue Trader (15), ignores all the enticing genre possibilities and turns out a plodding biopic, featuring a central character with all the depth of the despicable yuppie from the Audi commercial. A wan Ewan McGregor plays Leeson as the archetypal Man Behaving Badly – a Watford barrowboy who likes boozing and dropping his trousers in public. His wife Lisa, played by Anna Friel, is even more perfunctorily sketched; all she does is work out at the gym, mooch around in their Singapore flat, have a miscarriage and – when her husband finally owns up to having lost eight billion yen – exclaim, "Oh, Nick!" as though he'd spilt breakfast cereal down his tie. Meanwhile, back in the City, the venerable toffs at Barings – headed by John Standing – have been reluctant to pull the plug on their whizz-kid's funding because he seems to be making them so much dosh. The film, disappointingly, skims over this astonishing combination of stupidity and greed, as though Dearden were reluctant to paint any of his characters as anything other than lovable duffers. Not so much skimmed over as not mentioned at all are the ordinary investors who presumably lost their savings in the debacle. Leeson himself is depicted more as victim than villain – not surprising since the screenplay was adapted from his own book. But he's so underwritten (in more senses than one) that it's impossible to feel empathy. Every so often he vomits – not just from strain, but perhaps also from the cancer already eating into his colon – but the narrative conveys no sense of tension or impending doom, no matter how many times Dearden shows young oiks in stripy blazers yelling and gesticulating on the trading floor. Our anti-hero stands to lose everything – career, wife, health – and do we care? Not really. The escalation of a relatively small debt into an implacable black hole is carefully charted, and the nuts and bolts of Leeson's scam are assiduously laid out. But we're left none the wiser, because Rogue Trader doesn't seem to be actually about anything; it's just the indifferently edited highlights of its protagonist's giddy career. A criminal waste of a brilliant story. |
