The Guarantee

Back in 2011, Margin Call hit cinemas, telling the story of the beginning of the financial collapse inside the U.S. financial system over the course of one night. Even with most of the action taking place inside offices and meeting rooms, they managed to take what might seem like a laborious and not particularly cinematic event, and turn it into something tightly wound and fantastically well told. Add in the unique ins-and-outs of the Irish boom and subsequent bail-out, chances were good we could havehad our very own Margin Call on our hands. Alas, it was not to be, as it’s the audience that will need a bailing out long before The Guarantee comes to an end.

Kicking off at the peak of the boom, right around the time when the nay-sayers started noticing that this particular bubble was reaching critical mass, and telling the story right on through to the long night when the Irish government finalise the agreement to save the banks from themselves, we’re once again in offices and meeting rooms, albeit very obviously offices and meeting rooms on a soundstage. The low budget can’t help but constantly call attention to itself, as director Ian Power (who previously delivered undervalued gem The Runway) fails to break free of the film’s theatrical origins, with blacked out rooms and cheap green-screen as far as the eye can see.

The script reads like half-fan fiction imagining, half-financial report, and never once manages to conjure up more than a dramatized re-enactment. The cast do okay, but the doubled-up roles – Peter Coonan plays Anglo Irish Bank head honcho David Drumm AND “The Central Banker”, for example, and the way he plays them both is borderline interchangeable – doesn't really do the film any favours. Plus, there’s only so many different ways a cast can be expected to read percentages with the requisite amount of emotion.

With some inter-spliced talking heads scattered throughout (turns out the best actor in this whole movie is George W Bush), those completely in the dark on the financial hobbling Ireland has been through will probably find some of this enlightening. For everyone else, The Guarantee feels like it should have come out with all guns blazing, and instead it winds up as kind of a misfire.