When Netflix gathers a bunch of well-known actors so you can enjoy them at home any time, you simply can’t miss out on this offer. Their latest movie, The Laundromat, explores how shell companies work and what happens to those affected by them, plus it’s based on a true story, which came from 2016’s Panama Papers.
Ellen Martin (a fictional character created for the movie and played by Meryl Streep) loses her husband and friend during a boat accident on their vacation. She plans to move to Las Vegas with the life insurance money from her husband and the settlement from the boat company, but it turns out that she is not getting anything because the insurance company the boat company is under, is in fact an offshore company called Mossack & Forseca – led by Jürgen Mossack (Gary Oldman) and Ramón Fonseca (Antonio Banderas). Ellen starts to investigate on her own to find evidence against them, whilst the movie also follows other victims and those accountable.
Judging from the trailer it seemed the movie would be more so a comedy rather then a sarcastic kind of documentary. Oldman and Banderas not only act as the big bad guys, but they take on the part of narrating the story to the audience, too. What I liked about this concept is that you can fully understand the legal aspect along with examples. For example, Mr. Boncamper (Jeffrey Wright) who is the director of 46 different companies for Mossack & Fonseca, and Mia Beltran. who owns 25,000 companies, well, at least on paper. If something happens to them, they must be quickly replaced so that the offshore company can continue to exist. It is quite disturbing to see how easy such a business can survive.
Can this not be stopped? Back in 2016, Barack Obama, President of the United States at that time, spoke about the whistleblowing of the Panama Papers, “We’ve had another reminder in this big dump of data coming out of Panama that tax avoidance is a big, global problem. It’s not unique to other countries. A lot of it is legal, but that’s exactly the problem. It’s not that they’re breaking the laws, it’s that the laws are so poorly designed.” So, if each country is not changing their laws, offshore companies will continue to exist.
Despite the fun narrating and the educational aspects, the movie concentrated too much on the private lives of each victim and lost track of the main story.
Unfortunately, the long list of names attached to this movie looked good, but it turns out to be a disappointment with only brief appearances from Sharon Stone, Melissa Rauch, David Schwimmer, Robert Patrick, Jeffrey Wright, and Nonso Anozie.
