All the Money in the World review: A crime thriller that banishes the ghost of Kevin Spacey…

    Above: Christopher Plummer in All the Money in the World. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Ridley Scott’s drama about the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III looked sunk after allegations were made against the actor, but Christopher Plummer excels as his last-minute replacement.

‘The rich are different from you and me,” said F Scott Fitzgerald, to which Ernest Hemingway is famously alleged to have replied: “Yes, they have more money.” This film suggests they also have more fear of their own children – fear that they will parasitically suck away energy that should be devoted to building up riches and status; that they will fail to be worthy inheritors of it, or waste it, or cause it to be catastrophically mortgaged to their own pampered weakness.

This fear is the driving force of Ridley Scott’s pedal-to-the-metal thriller about the ageing and super-rich oil tycoon (Paul Getty), freely adapted by screenwriter David Scarpa from the 1995 page-turner Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortune and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J Paul Getty by veteran true-crime author John Pearson.

It is directed by the ever-so-young-at-heart 80-year-old Ridley Scott. The guy is a master of golden screen adaptations. Plus. In All the Money – The old guy is always the most interesting character on screen, and that can hardly be an accident?

In 1973, Getty refused to pay the kidnap ransom demanded after his 16-year-old grandson John Paul Getty III was snatched by mobsters from the streets of Rome. And why? Because he didn’t want to set a precedent and reward crime? Because he suspected this wastrel boy had cooked up a scheme to scam him? Or because, he just didn’t feel like parting with a single dime?

Only when a severed ear arrives through the post does the old boy feel like getting out his chequebook.

Christopher Plummer won a footnote in the history of the #MeToo campaign when Scott, disgusted by the allegations thrown at Kevin Spacey, replaced his star with Plummer for last-second reshoots.

Yet Plummer doesn’t look like a hasty replacement. He relishes the role. It fits him perfectly.

When it came to late casting calls. Culturedemandsgeeks will put their money on Mark Walberg being the surprising cast member that had been brought in at short notice. Mark, is Chase, Getty’s CIA-trained bodyguard and special ops guy. Everyone else is strenuously acting a role in period 1973 costume, accent and style. Wahlberg rocks up in a 2017 Kingsman suit and big glasses and more or less does his standard cop-firefighter-regular-guy routine.

For the purposes of showbusiness entertainment, this film hugely exaggerates the drink- and drug-related debility of Getty’s son John Paul II (Andrew Buchan) and ramps up the heroic importance of John Paul II’s ex-wife Gail, the victim’s mother, played with a kind of Katharine-Hepburn-like accent by Michelle Williams.

Gail earlier got custody of Getty’s grandkids in divorce proceedings, and the film cleverly hints that this was already a kind of kidnapping for the gloweringold patriarch. And here it is Gail who must battle for the release of her son, in the face of the kidnappers’ ruthlessness and that of her former father-in-law.

John Paul III is played by Charlie Plummer (ah, ha, no relation to Christopher). Is the grandson of penny-pinching oil tycoon — and then-richest man in the world — John Paul Getty. In 1973, when he was 16, the younger Getty was kidnapped in Rome and held ransom. While in captivity, his ear was notoriously sliced off and mailed to a local newspaper.

“Certainly it’s an interesting role, it’s an interesting story,” says Plummer. “I wasn’t put in any stressful situations that I had to deal with, anything other than what was right in front of me. But what was right in front of me was a pretty intense situation, just given the story and what the character was going through. There are definitely some scenes in the movie that are intense, to say the least — and pretty painful and scary.”

To prepare for the role, Plummer explored media coverage of the kidnapping and read a few books about the situation. He stopped short of interacting with the Getty family. (Getty III passed in 2011 and has a son, Balthazar Getty, also an actor.)

Romain Duris is a little wasted on the role of “Cinquanta”, the kidnapper hoodlum who begins to have protective feelings for the poor, moon-faced, hippy rich kid who must shortly undergo an ear-reduction process.

Political and non-political kidnappings are a grisly part of 70s history. One year after the teenage Getty was abducted, the same thing happened to publishing heiress Patty Hearst.

All The Money in the World is not perfect; there is a touch of naivety and stereotyping in its depiction of ‘Italians’ with their one, redemptive nice-guy gangster. There are definitely some scenes in the movie that are intense too.

But with the help of Plummer’s tremendous performance, Ridley Scott gives us a very entertaining parable about money and what it can’t buy.

4 / 5 stars