Bridget Cardigan (Diane Keaton) might clean toilets for a living, but she’s no ordinary janitor. You can tell by the way she shows up to work in pearls, a prim white blouse, and a sweater tied around her neck, and how she drives home each night to a large, beautiful Martha Stewart house in the suburbs. Indeed, she hasn’t held down a paying job in years, but when her husband Don (Ted Danson) gets laid off, she needs to start bringing in money somehow—and this lowly job scrubbing porcelain and Windexing security monitors at the Federal Reserve in Kansas City is the only position she’s qualified for.But Bridget’s a wily one: she soon notices a loophole in the Fed’s supposedly airtight security measures—a loophole that her menial status makes her uniquely qualified to exploit.
And that’s the setup of Mad Money, an amiable heist comedy (based on a 2001 British TV-movie) co-starring Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes as Keaton’s partners in crime. I won’t get into how their plan works—suffice it to say that it involves a couple of padlock switcheroos, a wastebasket, the ladies’ room, and vast sums of untraceable currency earmarked for the incinerator.
There’s something nicely satirical about the way that Bridget feels absolutely entitled to all this money—as if no jury in the world would possibly convict her of doing everything she can to avoid giving up her cushy upper-middle-class lifestyle. I’m not sure the movie notices the joke, though—when Bridget and Don are almost brought to tears by the thought of having to live in an apartment and smell other people’s cooking, director Callie Khouri shoots the scene in a way that suggests she’s on their side.
It’s kind of screwy: its three heroines are robbing a federal bank, but even though Khouri is the woman who once wrote Thelma and Louise, there’s not even a trace of subversive “stick it to the man” sentiment to Mad Money—these women just want to buy new motor homes, send their kids to private school, and redo their bathrooms. The boss (Stephen Root, a welcome presence in any movie) isn’t even that bad a guy—sure, he’s a hardass, but it’s not like he’s some kind of douchebag just begging to get his comeuppance.
The movie is just enough better than it looks to make you wish it had done what it needed to actually be good. I strongly doubt whether Bridget’s plan would actually work in real life, but it’s detailed and coherent enough for me to buy it within the world of the movie. The three female leads are likable and have a nice chemistry together—even when they have to do a bunch of those dumb post-robbery movie scenes where the characters are so happy their plan worked that they start throwing big fistfuls of money into the air.
The government wastes so much money that the idea of a few clever, downtrodden people getting rich by literally picking up the sweepings from the floor is an appealing one. But Mad Money wastes its premise on dumb, sitcommy gags—e.g., Keaton, newly flush with cash, finding herself unable to resist buying a $60,000 diamond ring... and then wearing it to work!—and a cheap, crowd-pleasing happy ending. It’s mildly entertaining, but like the money its heroines steal, it’s totally disposable. No one would ever miss it if it weren’t there.
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