You just don’t get movies like Money Monster anymore. Jodie Foster’s fourth feature film, after Little Man Tate, Home for the Holidays, and the Mel Gibson starring oddity that is The Beaver, doesn’t belong in the cinematic landscape of 2016, which is a good thing. This kind of mid budget thriller was last popular in the nineties, although Money Monster’s DNA stretches back to the seventies: specifically to two films by the master of media satire Sidney Lumet. Money Monster is the love child of Dog Day Afternoon, and Network. Let’s not get crazy though, while it’s a fine film, Money Monster is no way near as good as either of these classics.

George Clooney, who also co-produced and no wonder, this is his finest role since The Descendants, plays Lee Gates, a sleazy host of the daily financial show Money Monster. Gates job, along with the garish hip hop dance numbers (seriously Clooney’s fearless), is to advise his viewers on when to buy or sell stocks, or something technical like that. His show is taken over by ordinary joe Kyle Budwell, played by Jack O’Connell, who holds Gates at gunpoint, and makes him wear a bomb vest, to make a stand for the little people on air. The reason for this is that Kyle, along with many others, lost a lot of money when Gates advised them to buy stock in the conglomerate IBIS Clear Capital. Gates, with the help of his producer (Julia Roberts) have to try and manage the volatile young man otherwise they get blown up.

The financial jargon that the plot is weighed down with can’t hide the films good points. The cast is excellent, Jack O’Connell is incredibly intense as Budwell, despite the fact that his American accent isn’t quite up to scratch. Clooney and Roberts recreate some of their great chemistry from the Oceans films even though they mostly communicate through ear pieces. Together they strategize to find a way of stripping Kyle’s control of the situation. There’s even a meaty role for Outlander star Caitriona Balfe as IBIS PR officer who is seemingly the only honest person in the entire company. Foster’s direction is and editing keep the tension on a slow boil, carefully building the tension inside the studio paralleling with the police formulating plans to get in.

As a straight up thriller, Money Monster is a tense exercise in the dynamics of power, but Foster never truly reaches the level of satire that was Lumet’s bread and butter. Even as she’s growing as a story-teller, Foster can’t escape the usual thriller stumbling blocks: sometimes the wrap-up is to formulaic, and as a director who is more famous for her acting career she sometimes falls into the trap of over directing. It is only her fourth feature, and despite these problems Money Monster is a well-paced, well-acted, and the type of movie we need more of in 2016.