REVIEW: All The Money in the World cashes in big-time on the most famous kidnapping of 1970s

REVIEW: All The Money in the World is the true story of the most mind-boggling (and long and drawn-out) kidnapping of all-time. Also the movie Kevin Spacey got erased from!

ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD (M)

Rating: three and a half stars (3.5 out of 5)

Director: Ridley Scott (The Martian)

Starring: Michelle Williams, Christopher Plummer, Mark Wahlberg, Charlie Plummer.

You can’t put a price on family. But can you ask for a discount?

In 1973, self-made oil billionaire J. Paul Getty was not just the richest man in the world. He was the richest man in the history of the world.

Now imagine you are J. Paul Getty III, the tycoon’s grandson.

While on holiday in Rome, you’ve been kidnapped by Calabrian gangsters, who have issued a ransom demand of 17 million dollars for your return.

You know this amount should be pocket change for your grandpa. Old J. Paul will pay off those pesky perps, and have you home safely in a day or so, right?

Wrong.

Say hello to J. Paul Getty (Christopher Plummer), a serial skinflint who makes Monty Burns look like a wastrel.

So begins All the Money in the World, a truth-is-far-freakier-than-fiction affair that takes a long sequence of agonising actual events, and lets their sheer strangeness speak for themselves.

This is the movie that made headlines a few months ago when director Ridley Scott made the radical decision to recast the linchpin role of J. Paul Getty after production was well and truly complete.

88-year-old Christopher Plummer was recruited to replace the disgraced Kevin Spacey, and all relevant scenes were re-shot inside a fortnight.

88-year-old Christopher Plummer had just a fortnight to reel off his scenes in "All the Money in the World." Not bad for an old codger, what?

It must be said that Plummer is mesmerisingly great as Getty, to the point where it is impossible to imagine Spacey getting anywhere near the heights hit here.

As for the movie, it doesn’t always match the magnificence of Plummer’s performance. It is not really the fault of veteran filmmaker Ridley Scott or his team. Rather, the facts that must be adhered to in telling this true story sometimes work against the cinematic ambition of the production.

A lot of All the Money in the World focuses on the plight of the abducted teen’s mother Gail (Michelle Williams), already estranged from the Getty clan when the kidnapping went down.

Literally forced to beg her former father-in-law to intercede, Gail finds herself waiting a seeming eternity — often in the company of a conflicted Getty associate (a miscast Mark Wahlberg) — for the wily old scrooge to make any kind of meaningful move.

Gail Getty (Michelle Williams) works the phones in a bid to save her son’s life in a scene from "All the Money in the World." (Fabio Lovino/Sony Pictures via AP)

Incredibly, it takes over six months for this saga to reach its infamous boiling point (don’t look on the internet to see how it ends, whatever you do).

By this time Getty, has bargained down the ransom to a price he believes holds certain tax advantages for a man in his exalted position.

Never will you see a man worth so much behave so cheaply.

Originally published as REVIEW: All The Money in the World cashes in big-time on the most famous kidnapping of 1970s