REVIEW: Mad Money

By BY ROGER MOORE THE ORLANDO (FLA.) SENTINEL

LITTLE ROCK — It has been amusing to watch the edgy, smart, much-imitated Diane Keaton of Woody Allen, Warren Beatty and Shoot the Moon evolve into a beloved, not-quite-matronly mainstay of girl-power comedies. But that's nothing to the transition that Callie Khouri, writer of girl power's magnum opus Thelma & Louise, makes. Or the contortions that Queen Latifah, star of Set It Off and Chicago, had to go through as they both morph into sentimental mush-pushers.

Mad Money is a cutesy caper comedy of theover-familiar variety - daffy and feminist if not exactly hilarious and edgy. Whatever points it scores come from casting, some of it on the nose, some against type. If we've been conditioned in the decades since Father of the Bride and Baby Boom to find Keaton to be comic comfort food, and Queen Latifah can attach her name to all manner of sentimental tripe as she tap-dances into mom roles, we're not used to seeing Katie Holmes take the broad stab at wacky that shedoes here.

Movie

Mad Money

70

Rating: PG-13

Length: 1 hour, 44 minutes

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The trio play low-level employees at the Kansas City Federal Reserve. Keaton is Bridget, an upper-class spendthrift doing custodial work to try to save her big house after her husband (Ted Danson, showing off his perfect timing) loses his job. Latifah is a working-class single mom running the shredding machine. And Holmes is the iPod-addicted Tiny Dancer who bops her way from one department to the next, dropping off payloads.

It's saving those payloads from the shredder that this caper is about. At Bridget's instigation, the ladies team up to steal the worn-out bills that the Fed retires from circulation, a crime they'll pull off right under the nose of the obnoxiously watchful boss (Stephen Root), a man who warns that he has his eye on "everyone, everywhere, every minute."

As comedies go, the plot isn't much of a nail-biter - the odd complication, mild disagreementover goals. And the subtexts are dollar-bill thin. This is about greed.

Keaton doesn't bring her Agame here, and suggests none of the comically acquisitive darker side the character is meant to have. Latifah rubs all the edge and most of the ethnicity off her mom. And Holmes is playing someone so alien to her screen persona that she needs deprogramming to find her funny bone.

One thing that lets the air out of this farce is its structure. We're told the story in a series of flashbacks, interviews with the principles from what is plainly a police station.

Still, as a comedy aimed at an older audience perhaps out of the moviegoing habit, Mad Money hits enough amusing notes to play. It's just a lot more sane and tame than its "mad" title would have you believe.

MovieStyle, Pages 39, 44 on 01/18/2008