Movie Review: Equity

I’ve almost perfected my new rating system for movies on planes. It’s a five point scheme, and it works like this:

1. Movie gets one sun for interesting story with good acting

2. Movie gets one sun for not having an English villain

3. Movie gets one sun for not being too dark or have lots of special effects, so you can enjoy it properly on an airplane screen

4. Movie gets one sun if I watched all the way to the end without falling asleep or turning over because I was bored

5. Movie gets one sun if it doesn’t have Kate Winslet in it

What do you think? I think this could make me bigger than Barry Norman, or whoever it is that does film reviews on the BBC nowadays.

So here we go with the first review under the new system.

Equity ☀️☀️☀️☀️

On my last flight I watched the rest of season two of Gomorrah, the Italian mafia drama series that I love. If you haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil it, except to say that it is a Shakespearian effort. The characters are wonderfully drawn and rounded, the acting is excellent and everyone is much better dressed than they are in English crime dramas. I never got into the Sopranos, so this was the first organised crime series that I’d seen for while.

Then I watched Equity, which was about disorganised crime (i.e., investment banking). In Dungeons & Dragons terminology, the mafia are lawful evil whereas investment bankers are chaotic evil. The mafia, like the Assassin’s Guild, have a code. Investment bankers don’t: they will stab anyone in the back for a couple of points. No-one trusts anyone, there is no loyalty up or down and anyone could betray anyone else as the drop of hat.

This made it a good movie, although it probably should have been called “Equity by Bloomberg” since they feature prominently through the film. It was different, because it was largely from a female perspective, which meant that it had a couple of subplots that I found more interesting than I might have otherwise. It had a nice dramatic arc of tragedy through betrayal. I thought that one of the lead characters was a little unreal and I found that slightly distracting, and I don’t see why two of the mean characters had to be English, but I watched all the way to end without nodding off even once. It’s about investment banking, by the way, and one of the companies that is a focus of the bankers’ efforts is privacy-enhancing social network (this doesn’t give anything away).

Summary: wouldn’t bother going to the cinema to see it and will almost certainly never watch it again on cable or computer, but it’ a good movie to watch while having your dinner on a plane.