Sex.
Now that I've got your attention, when was the last time you watched a movie that was positively dripping in sex, and you still found yourself completely bored out of your mind? Sex in cinema is usually used in one of two ways: trashy abandon (Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Cruel Intentions) or intimately revealing (The Notebook, Brokeback Mountain, Lust Caution). The Taste Of Money has sex coming out the wazoo, but remains defiantly, rule-breakingly dull.
Joo (Kim-Kang Woo) is little more than a glorified bag handler for a super-rich Korean family who are currently in hot water over some potentially dodgy business dealings. An American business-man (Darcy Paquet, an actor so bad that he may single-handedly redefine bad acting) enters the mix, bringing with him the potential for a lot of money, and a lot more trouble, and from there the rich family begins to spin out. Certain family members are caught cheating, there's blackmailing and hidden cameras, there's seduction that borders on rape, there's a lot of people wanting to bone a lot of other people, and you won't care about any of it.
Dropping us in at the deep end of a myriad of plots and characters, none of which are properly defined or explained, The Taste Of Money hopes you'll continue to pay attention because the sets are expensive and some of the characters are attractive. Woo spends a McConaughey-level of time with his shirt off, abs akimbo, every now and again in bed with someone, but more often than not there doesn't seem to be a discernible reason as to why.
This could have been either a trashy cult classic like Sliver if it had committed to the nasty cause, or it could have tried to tell the story of how some people feel they are entitled to do whatever (or whoever) they want because they have a lot of money. Instead it falls between two chairs, making for some truly unerotic sex scenes, and very oddly, trashy conversations about business mergers. A complete mess.
