Many elements are there that would make for a great film but instead of being the ambitious and righteous movie it should be, it abruptly ends with a moment so shockingly earnest that is pretty embarrassing.
It's a fascinating failure though, since the movie has many terrific elements and a subject matter worth stewing over -- the Panana Papers -- which nearly a decade ago exposed the widespread manipulation off international offshore accounts to the benefit of the 1% and the detriment of all the rest of us.
The movie wants to leave you outraged -- at the grifting and injustice -- but Soderbergh's aloof approach feels like an awkward fit for this material. He introduces semi-tantalizing plot lines and stories (Jeffrey Wright turns up as a West Indian front man, and then is promptly dropped from the narrative, for example) only to abandon them for new ones. I know the goal is to portray the interconnected web of what essentially amounts to a pyramid scheme, but the movie is too short (1 hr 36 minutes) and too slight for us to muster much emotion for many of the people on screen.
Meryl Streep gets the showiest, most developed character of the bunch and she has a few affecting moments -- I mean she's Meryl Streep after all -- but she also disappears for much of the film ceding arguably too much screen time to the movie's narrators -- two corrupt, dandy financiers played by Antonio Banderas and Gary Oldman (doing an exaggerated and not very great German accent).
I literally forgot that Sharon Stone pops up for a single scene as a heartless real estate agent until I wrote this sentence -- what a waste!
When the film starts to breakdown how shell companies work -- the movie can and does come to life (it was also shot by Soderbergh and it has a great sunkissed look about it), but it really needed to be more of a Robert Altman mosaic than an even more dumbed down The Big Short. Had Soderbergh gave his various time to breathe and intersect the movie might have had more power and justified the note it ends on but he opts for self-satisfied smugness instead.
The most illustrative example of this is the stunt casting of Streep in a second role (SPOILER ALERT) as a Panamanian woman who is moved of the ladder at a shell corporation in cover up malfeasance. She plays the role in a thick accent, under even thicker makeup. It's a testament to Streep's talent that I didn't immediately realize it was her under there (kind of like Tilda Swinton's unnecessary performance as an old man in the recent remake Suspiria.) but once I did I was confounded that a film in 2019 would do anything this tone deaf and deem it appropriate.
Had Soderbergh cast an actual middle aged Panamanian woman, perhaps a newcomer with a presence, the role could have been just as, if not more, effective -- but instead we get the fairly racist conceit of Streep dressing up as a Latina woman.. for fun?
It's a bizarre and distracting stunt, and it detracts from the movie which is already doing too much stating of the obvious. We know that rich people are often greedy -- we don't always know how they maintain their dominance that isn't always crystal clear.
When the movie interrogates that world it can work and it should have worked better, but for now, this film may be remembered as a rare total misfire for a director whose usually defined by the luscious precision of his style.
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