Director Alan J. Pakula has range ("All the President's Men," "Presumed Innocent," "The Pelican Brief"), but this is Hollywood Formula 1.0 with two bankable stars making whoopee: the poster is proof. It's too bad, because "Rollover" aims to be a courageous look at the potentially apocalyptic dangers of the global money markets. I am not even sure I agree with Sodie's review, "A Marxist interpretation" (21 Aug 1999), but he does justice to the subject, which is one that Pakula, Fonda (who made the similarly apocalyptic "China Syndrome" two years earlier), and probably the writers and Kristofferson took seriously, or tried to.
Unfortunately, Wall Street shenanigans are secondary to bedroom shenanigans, which is just one of the bad decisions driven by box-office tenets. Attention is lavished on posh settings and Fonda's gowns, while the plot gets its fuel from dramatic close-ups of the words "Account Number 21214" on documents. Turns out, it's a secret fund that could undermine the global economy. From what I gathered, billions of dollars (mostly from OPEC) were diverted to 21214 and/or converted to gold in an epochal fraud masterminded by one powerful American banker (Hume Cronyn) who makes Bernie Madoff look like Clyde Barrow.
Fonda is solid in her role, and strong supporting actors (Cronyn, Josef Sommer, Bob Gunton, Ron Frazier) do their best to buttress Kristofferson, but he was richly deserving of his Razzie nomination (a double: he was in "Heaven's Gate" that year, too). His performance is utter monotony, with little change of expression and none of voice. Equally bad is the musical score by Michael Small, never nominated for any award ever, and no wonder.
"Rollover" is so stuck in the past that it's almost forgotten. Movies moved on. Since its release in 1981, a raft of far superior movies about Wall Street followed, including Margin Call, The Big Short, Wall Street, The Wolf of Wall Street, Equity, Arbitrage, and Dumb Money-- and not one of them is a love story.
