MONEY PLANE

MONEY PLANE

Starring Aaron Copeland, Kelsey Grammer. Directed and co-written by Andrew Lawrence

2 stars (out of 5)

Every once in a while, you encounter a movie that is so dumb, so ridiculous, it shouldn’t have any redeeming qualities at all. That movie is Money Plane, except it has one redeeming quality: Kelsey Grammer. Yes, the erstwhile Sideshow Bob brings his A-game in a movie that doesn’t have a Z-game.

“Hello Seattle. I’m listening…to everybody except my agent”

The film opens with Jack Reese (Aaron Copeland, aka Edge from the wrestling world, wearing a fucking man-bun) narrating over some kind of art heist. About his team, he intones “It takes more than one flint to start a fire,”

No, it doesn’t. It takes one flint and a steel. This movie thinks I’m dumb, but if there’s one thing 40 seasons of Survivor has taught me, it’s how to use a flint to make fire. The fact that I only know this from watching Survivor is sad, so let’s move on.

Man-Bun literally doesn’t know left from right, so he’s really got no business lecturing anyone on any kind of strategy. Plus, I refuse to believe that anyone in a man-bun is an expert in anything other than artisanal coffee and the early work of Sonic Youth.

It turns out that this art heist was all just a big setup, and there was no painting there to steal. This angers our movie’s antagonist (Kelsey Grammer) who has the greatest villain name in the history of movies.

DARIUS EMMANUEL GROUCH THE THIRD, AKA THE RUMBLE.

“You may be evil, Grouch, but you’re not as evil as Vince McMahon.”

Let’s just stop one moment to just celebrate the absolute majesty of that name: Darius Emmanel Grouch the Third — there have been two before him. Were they also megalomaniacal art enthusiasts with ridiculous nicknames? “My father, Darius Emmanuel Grouch the second, he was known as The Skirmish. His daddy before him, Darius Emmanuel Grouch, well he was The Slap Fight.”

Darius Emmanuel Grouch the Third calls artists like Warhol and Pollock “bitches” before claiming “I could blow your brains all over this canvas and make my own Pollock!” Oh please. Pollock never worked in brain and skull. It would be immediately dismissed as a forgery. What an empty fucking threat.

Darius Emmanuel Grouch the Third (I’m just going to copy/paste than name, otherwise it’ll take me until Thanksgiving to write this) owns Man-Bun’s gambling debt, and can now just send him on any sort of cockamamie job he wants as repayment. That’s where the titular Money Plane comes in.

Behold, the world’s shittiest casino that isn’t located in Reno.

The Money Plane is a kind of hedonistic paradise for the worst criminals on earth who want to bet on illegal shit, because it flies over international airspace. It has millions of dollars in cash and billions in cryptocurrency on board, just ripe for the taking. It’s so extreme that, in the words of Darius Emmanuel Grouch the Third, you can bet on “a dude fucking an alligator”.

Of course, every part of the above paragraph is utter bullshit. You can’t do illegal shit in international airspace — the craft is under the jurisdiction of the country it’s registered in. A plane doesn’t have “billions in cryptocurrency” on board — that’s not how cryptocurrency works. And there’s absolutely no guy-on-gator action. Not that I was eagerly awaiting it or anything. That lotion is just next to me because I have dry skin.

Man-Bun says the plan to rob the Money Plane is “batshit crazy”. Dude, you don’t know the half of it. This whole movie is so batshit it must have been shot in an old guano mine.

His can’t-fail crew (who have already failed once) are driver Iggy (writer/director Andrew Lawrence,) Trey (Patrick Lamont Jr), a Black man who’s been given the alias “McGillicutty” — and boy oh boy do they run that racist joke into the ground. Then there’s femme-fatale Isabella (Katrina Norman), the only significant female role in the entire movie. She’s undercover as — you guessed it — a flight attendant. At one point, she even throws her fucking shoes at a bad guy. I’d call her a bargain-basement Bond girl, but this movie already has one of those. Meow.

“What the fuck did you just call me?”

Speaking of Denise Richards, she’s one of the three above-the-title actors (along with Grammer and Thomas Jane) who the producers clearly only had for one day of shooting each. While the other two have actual roles, Richards only gets five lines, and they are:

“All right you two, it’s bedtime.”

“I can’t believe you have to leave on such short notice.”

“All right Dad, story time. We’ll pick this up later.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah, she is amazing. Now come to bed babe.”

That’s her entire role, and it’s well under 2 minutes of screen time. There’s no way she spent more than an hour on set. That’s not a dig at Richards — this movie just doesn’t know what to do with female characters, so it doesn’t bother trying. Like me with a diet.

The casino-in-the-sky rivals the legendary Soul Plane in terms of excess, but without the charm of Kevin Hart and Tom Arnold. The whole plane is nothing but illegal drugs, horrible criminals, sex workers, and Andrew Lawrence’s more famous brothers. As for the gambling, as I said we are denied alligator-fucking, but we do get “Man Vs. Cobra”, a guy being devoured by piranhas, and some dude chopping off another dude’s arm for some stupid reason.

There’s also Matthew Lawrence as a Texan named JR (because of course he is) described as the “undefeated champion” of Russian Roulette. I kind of assumed he was undefeated by the fact that he’s breathing and doesn’t have a massive hole in his head. Spoiler alert — that doesn’t last long, and it’s the best part of the movie that doesn’t involve Darius Emmanuel Grouch the Third. Joey Lawrence, the other Lawrence brother (sigh, yes, the guy who said “Whoa!”) is also there as Money Plane’s concierge who really, really discourages cheating.

Man-Bun — who’s a pilot as well as a shitty heist planner — spends most of the movie flying the Money Plane over what appears to be land most of the time. So much for international airspace. By the way, this master tactician’s brilliant plan doesn’t take into account that planes have a co-pilot. He’s a regular Napoleon Bunaparte.

Pro-tip: if you’re going to cast a wrestler in your movie, maybe you should give him some fight scenes. Copeland has exactly one (the flight attendant has more), and it involves using a pilot’s yoke as a weapon, which I guess is no dumber than whacking someone with a folding chair. The rest of the time he’s in a pilot’s seat FaceTiming with Darius Emmanuel Grouch the Third. It’s like casting Triple H in a remake of My Dinner with Andre.

If you think this is tense, wait until the scene where he turns off the No Smoking sign.

Their original plan is kind of stupid, but their Plan B is equally stupid. Not to give the entire thing away — but who gives a shit — they decide to “redistribute” all of the money on board to charities and the needy. This involves dumping pallets worth of paper currency out the emergency door of the plane. The same plane that is supposed to be over international waters, so the money does fuck-all for anybody. Yet another brilliant tactical move from Bun Tzu.

The whole thing is just mind-bogglingly dumb. But Kelsey Grammer — bless his heart — brings it. He was paid for a day’s work, and he doesn’t care how dopey this movie is, he’s going to put in a day of goddamn work . His performance is a legitimately good bit of scenery-chewing that deserves a far better movie. It reminds me of Richard Dawson’s legendary performance in The Running Man, and I mean that in the best possible way. If you see it on Netflix or Prime, it’s worth watching just to experience the magic that is Darius Emmanuel Grouch the Third.

“I’ve got your tossed salad and scrambled eggs right here!”

Now if you’ll excuse me, Darius Emmanuel Grouch the Third promised alligator-fucking, and I’m going to scour the net until I find some alligator-fucking.