The Laundromat, a new financial satire based on the Panama papers

When her idyllic vacation takes an unthinkable turn, Ellen Martin (Academy Award winner Meryl Streep) begins investigating a fake insurance policy, only to find herself down a rabbit hole of questionable dealings that can be linked to a Panama City law firm and its vested interest in helping the world’s wealthiest citizens amass even larger fortunes.

The charming — and very well-dressed — founding partners Jürgen Mossack (Academy Award winner Gary Oldman) and Ramón Fonseca (Golden Globe nominee Antonio Banderas) are experts in the seductive ways shell companies and offshore accounts help the rich and powerful prosper. They are about to show us that Ellen’s predicament only hints at the tax evasion, bribery and other illicit absurdities that the super wealthy indulge in to support the world’s corrupt financial system.

Zipping through a kaleidoscope of comic detours in China, Mexico, Africa (via Los Angeles) and the Caribbean en route to 2016’s Panama Papers publication — where journalists revealed the secret, leaked documents of Mossack Fonseca’s high-profile patrons — THE LAUNDROMAT is directed by Academy Award winner Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s Eleven, Magic Mike, High Flying Bird) with a screenplay by Scott Z. Burns (The Informant!, The Report), adapted from “Secrecy World” by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Jake Bernstein.

The film is produced by Lawrence Grey, Gregory Jacobs, Michael Sugar and Burns with a cast that includes Jeffrey Wright, Melissa Rauch, Jeff Michalski, Jane Morris, Robert Patrick, David Schwimmer, Cristela Alonzo, Larry Clarke, Will Forte, Chris Parnell, Nonso Anozie, Larry Wilmore, Jessica Allain, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Matthias Schoenaerts, Rosalind Chao, Kunjue Li, Ming Lo, with James Cromwell and Sharon Stone.

Review of the film, The Laundromat

The Laundromat follows in the footsteps of The Big Short, and a growing number of fictional and documentary films which attempt to unravel and explain the financial manipulations and shenanigans taking place globally over the last two decades. The film does boast a strong cast, and is already attracting a wider audience than just the fintech and banking community. Meryl Streep is her usual reliable self, but Antonio Banderas and Gary Oldman really steal the show with their dubious attempt to tell their side of the story. Gary Oldman especially delivers well with his hilarious, and yet utterly plausible indignant but hurt German accent.

The twin rogues narrative by Oldman and Banderas helps to keep moving the story along, and it does hop through a variety of visually dazzling locations in St Nevis, China, Panama as well as the US. This helps as the subject matter, shell companies within shell companies within more shell companies that enable the super rich to avoid paying any tax, let alone small amounts of it.

Having reviewed a series of recent books covering these practices (see many here) we enjoyed the visual elaboration of these concepts. The visual narrative keeps things moving well as the director aims to show rather than tell. This does ensure that the dialogue does not get too bogged down in what could otherwise be quite dry subject matter.

It has been an interesting journey for Netflix in terms of the evolution of its inhouse unique content, some of which has had the budget, and the cast but not the wow factor, or rather just because it was made, it didn’t mean that it needed to be made. El Camino, the Breaking Bad movie for example fell into this category. We are big fans of the Breaking Bad series, but the briefly extended further adventures of Jessie Pinkerman didn’t seem to add a whole lot to the canon.

With Laundromat in contrast they seem to have assembled both a great cast, with an important story to be tell, and managed to put them both together for a successful result. Who knows what else they have lined up but if they can continue in this vein then Netflix will continue it’s journey towards trying to become a content power house too. Watch this space.

More information about Irish Tech News and the Business Showcase

FYI the ROI for you is => Irish Tech News now gets over 1.5 million monthly views, and up to 900k monthly unique visitors, from over 160 countries. We have over 860,000 relevant followers on Twitter on our various accounts & were recently described as Ireland’s leading online tech news site and Ireland’s answer to TechCrunch, so we can offer you a good audience!

Since introducing desktop notifications a short time ago, which notify readers directly in their browser of new articles being published, over 16000 people have now signed up to receive them ensuring they are instantly kept up to date on all our latest content. Desktop notifications offer a unique method of serving content directly to verified readers and bypass the issue of content getting lost in people’s crowded news feeds.

Drop us a line if you want to be featured, guest post, suggest a possible interview, or just let us know what you would like to see more of in our future articles. We’re always open to new and interesting suggestions for informative and different articles. Contact us, by email, twitter or whatever social media works for you and hopefully we can share your story too and reach our global audience.

Irish Tech News

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at [email protected] or on Twitter: @SimonCocking