The Laundromat (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

A precis of the Panama papers money-laundering and fraud scandal that came to light in 2016, The Laundromat comes armed with a galaxy of stars, led by Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas, and a declaration of intent to lay bare the nebulous mechanism of the global financial opacity facilitated by intentionally sloppy laws that allows tax evasion on a massive scale.
Streep plays a widow determined to get full compensation from the boating company involved following her husband's death, finding just layers of shell companies behind the insurance, while Oldman and Banderas play the real-life crook lawyers Mossack and Fonseca who were behind setting up thousands of shells with no questions asked regarding what they'd be used for, of course. The duo play their roles as if they were Vegas showmen, starting with a comically-toned global finance 101 about the elusive nature of money, and so we have a serious subject turned into entertainment right from the outset lest the subject prove too dry to hold the audience's attention.
Interspersed with this main thread, there are sub-stories which have a rather too tenuous connection to the theme, particularly the protracted episode where Nonso Anozie's philandering African millionaire gets his comeuppance from his family. It does serve as an eyeopener on the dire state of things in the scarcely regulated financial market, but really only for those who haven't ever been exposed at all to its realities. And the fact that it moves from shoehorning in laughs to an earnest final polemic about what lies ahead from Streep, now no longer in character, makes for an uneven experience altogether.

5/10