It's an odd thing that in an age when money is God, banks are regarded as the embodiment of evil. Everyone hates banks, and its easy to get an audience on-side to a bit of bank-bashing. We derive guilty pleasure from seeing a bank get its come-uppance; pleasure, because we resent the humiliation they routinely dish out to us as their customers, as well as the charges, foreclosures and cartel-like behaviour they indulge in at our expense. Guilt, because we too subscribe to dreams of wealth and power, it's just that most of us are not ruthless and callous enough to realise them.
This is a simple, straightforward, well produced thriller with a strong script and some good performances from the main players. The story concerns a maths wiz from country Victoria (David Wenham) who with the aid of chaos theory has developed a program to predict financial market trading. The CEO of Centabank (Anthony La Paglia), pressured by his board for more profits, hires him in Melbourne to perfect the program fro the benefit of the bank. Early results are promising, but our wiz seems to have an agenda of his own. Meanwhile, a failed houseboat operator and his wife are seeking redress against the bank in respect of a dodgy foreign currency loan they were conned into.
Part of the plot is similar to `The Farm', with Colin Friels and Greta Scacchi, recently shown on ABC TV (Australia). Here though we have the extra dimension of the financial market thriller, presented in an understandable way. Techicalities are avoided all you have to do is watch the graph to see what is going on. The supporting characters are not particularly remarkable but the two leads Wenham and La Piaglia are well defined and well balanced. If the script had not been so good La Piaglia could have been a caricature, but he is instead quite believable, though I'm not sure deriding a gunman for his personal weaknesses is always an effective way of persuading him to put the gun down. David Wenham is good at slightly enigmatic characters (Diver Dan in `Seachange', the boss boy in `The Boys' (also directed by Robert Connolly, the director here) and he gives his character here the required amount of mystery. His love interest (Sybilla Budd) who he meets at work, seems a bit incidental she's not exactly superfluous but isn't really in on the plot until late in the movie, and in the end, well
