Review: The Laundromat

Thanks to films like Roma, Vince Gilligan’s El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie and Martin Scorsese’s upcoming The Irishman, Netflix films seem to be carving out a great pathway for the streaming service’s cinematic output. Now director Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s trilogy, Magic Mike) is the latest to unleash a feature and the material is certainly explosive...

The Laundromat is based on the Panama Papers leak of 2015 and specifically Jake Bernstein’s 2017 book Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite. The crux of the story centres on Ellen Martin (Streep), whose vacation results in tragedy and instead of answers she only finds rage and confusion as her investigation for justice leads to an uncovering of countless shady deals and greed, all leading to back to a Panama law firm headed by Jürgen Mossack (Oldman) and Ramón Fonseca (Banderas).

From the start, it is clear that Soderbergh is going less for the straight approach and more for the fourth-wall breaking route used in Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya or by Adam McKay in The Big Short or Vice, with some strands of DNA taken from Scorsese’s searing The Wolf of Wall Street too. Indeed, the real story influencing this movie is equally as shattering, and while Soderbergh’s film never fails to keep you watching, his approach does sometimes leave the film a bit muddled and less biting, in a way the likes of Vice never was.

The fragmented structure, with a number of subplots, and an excess of information occasionally combines to leave you a bit lost at points, as the film seems to pick at a number of styles but not quite focus on the main points all the time. No doubt about it the greed is clear to see and there are a number of sequences here that quite rightly provoke anger and/or debate about tax evasion and abuses by the wealthiest of businessmen (and political figures) but it just does not hit with the strength that it should.

However the performances are excellent, Streep gets star billing, although this is more Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas’ show, as they essentially narrate the story and take great joy in amping up the pantomime corporate villainy and naturally they are great at it. Streep is brilliant as Ellen and feels very relatable, as she is lost in this increasingly tangled web of lies and underhandedness, though her cameo of sorts as a Panama office worker (despite having a kind of point come the end) may very understandably not sit well with some viewers.

Other strong supporting turns are offered by Jeffrey Wright as fibbing accountant Malchus Irvin Boncamper and by Nonso Anozie, Nikki Amuka-Bird and Jessica Allain, whose subplot as a family torn apart by infidelity and bribery ties into the overall themes of lies and their corruptive nature as they build.





The Laundromat is a wild ride of how frighteningly easy it is for lives to be ruined and even easier for deceitful pockets to be filled as a result of sheets of paper and the wealthy people who hold the pens. It may lack the memorable clobber of other cinema it draws influence from but you’ll be suitably outraged (if not always surprised) while it plays out before your eyes.

15
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas, Jeffrey Wright
Release Date: Out Now (Netflix)