First Hit: Confusing in presentation and often meandering away from the point, this movie fails in presenting how shell companies work to launder money and how this wrongdoing is hidden from governments.
This film attempts to teach and engage the audience about the art of laundering money through a story of tragedy, charts and graphs, and humorous vignettes. It fails on all three fronts.
Jurgen Mossack (Gary Oldman) and Ramon Fonseca (Antonio Banderas) are two flamboyant law partners based in Panama City who run a set of bogus insurance and reinsurance companies. These insurance companies scam others by taking their money, hide it, change documentation, and then legally never payout against the claims. They also have set up schemes of shell companies where money is hidden and moved around so that taxes are never paid on the money.
The human life stories they use include Ellen and Joe Martin (Meryl Streep and James Cromwell, respectively) who are in retirement and decide to go on a lake tour boat. The boat capsizes because of a rogue wave, and Joe dies along with several others. Ellen, as one of the survivors, expects a class action financial settlement from the tour boat company’s insurance company.
However, Ellen’s lawyer (Larry Clarke) discovers that the insurance company used by the boat tour company had sold the policy to someone else and that the timing issue means the boat company wasn’t insured.
The film spends a little time with the boat owner, Captain Paris (Robert Patrick), as he discovers from his employee Matthew Quirk (David Schwimmer) that he’d gotten a deal on the insurance, and that’s why he selected this company. The payments were going to a shell company (postal box) on Nevis Island in the Caribbean that is run by Malchus Irvin Boncamper (Jeffrey Wright).
Ellen, who is mad as hell, traces the payment scheme and goes to Nevis, hoping to recover a settlement and discovers that the address is only a postal box.
The film stupidly adds in stuff about how Boncamper has two families, one on Nevis and one in Miami. And he gets caught in this charade while being arrested in Miami by the federal government.
The story also adds in other drama about a wealthy man, from Africa, living in the US having an affair with his daughter’s college friend. Getting caught by the daughter, he bribes her to not tell her mother by giving her a company that’s supposedly is worth $20M. Because of a previous indiscretion that his wife knew about, this man had also given his wife a company. Angry at the bribe and tired of his shenanigans, the wife and daughter head to Panama City to visit Mossack and Fonseca and cash in their stock.
Of course, they discover that their companies are fake shell organizations, and the stock is worth nothing because the husband has transferred all the funds to his own companies.
There are ill-timed and confusing graphics thrown into the mix, and there are additional maudlin scenes of Ellen with her daughter and grandchildren in Las Vegas where Ellen and Joe had met. The whole Las Vegas segue could have been left out as it added little to the story.
This film suffers significantly from the beginning moments with Mossack and Fonseca in contrived scenes with them talking to the camera and attempting to explain financial schemes in horrible accents that make it even more muddled.
Streep is wasted and horribly underused in this story. Oldman is horrible. I’ve no idea of what he was attempting to represent because one moment he’s sitting in a beach chair and the next he’s pretending to be a lawyer using a perverse accent. Banderas was slightly better than Oldman, but not much. Wright was okay as the elusive representative of a fake insurance company. Schwimmer was OK as the relative and employee of the tour boat company that had looked to save them money on insurance premiums. There are nearly forty other actors playing roles in this story, but because the story is confusingly contrived, no one character is developed. Scott Z. Burns wrote a disastrous screenplay. Steven directed this, and it would have been interesting to better understand what was in his head. I was thrown from one ill-conceived scene to another while being interrupted with graphic explanations with poorly articulated voiceovers.
Overall: I learned little to nothing about shell companies and tax avoidance because the stories thrown up on the screen were poorly conceived.