Though fairly tame, ‘Mad Money’ is funny

By ROGER MOORE

ORLANDO SENTINEL

It’s been amusing to watch the edgy, smart, much-imitated Diane Keaton of Woody Allen, Warren Beatty and “Shoot the Moon” evolve into this beloved, not-quite-matronly mainstay of girl-power comedies. But that’s nothing to the transition the writer of girl power’s magnum opus, “Thelma & Louise” (Callie Khouri), makes. Or the contortions the one-time star of “Set It Off” and “Chicago” (Queen Latifah) had to go through as they both morph into sentimental mush-pushers.

“Mad Money” is pure mush, a cutesy-poo caper comedy of the over-familiar variety — daffy and feminist if not exactly hilarious and edgy. Whatever points it scores come from casting, some of it on the nose, some against type. Because if we’ve been conditioned, in the decades since “Father of the Bride” and “Baby Boom,” to find Keaton to be comic comfort food, and Queen Latifah can attach her name to all manner of sentimental tripe as she tap-dances into mom roles, we’re not used to seeing Katie Holmes take the broad stab at “wacky” that she does here.

The trio play low-level employees at the Kansas City Federal Reserve. Keaton is Bridget, an upper-class spendthrift doing custodial work to try to save her big house after her husband (Ted Danson, showing off his perfect timing) loses his job. Latifah is a working-class single mom running the shredding machine. And Holmes is the iPod-addicted Tiny Dancer who bops her way from one department to the next, dropping off payloads.

It’s saving those payloads from the shredder that this caper is about. At Bridget’s instigation, the ladies team up to steal the worn-out bills that the Fed retires from circulation, a crime they’ll pull off right under the nose of the obnoxiously watchful boss (Stephen Root), a man who warns that he has his eye on “everyone, everywhere, every minute.”

As comedies go, the plot isn’t much of a nail-biter — the odd complication, mild disagreement over goals. And the subtexts are dollar-bill thin. This is about greed.

“Don’t you want things?” Keaton’s profligate suburbanite asks the single mom.

“I don’t want things I can’t have,” Nina (Latifah) retorts.

“Do you live in America?” Bridget shrieks, incredulous as the thought.

Greed will be their undoing, we’re led to believe.

But Keaton doesn’t bring her A-game here, and suggests none of the comically acquisitive darker side the character is meant to have. Latifah rubs all the edge and most of the ethnicity off her mom (she’s comically courted by colleagues in the Fed). And Holmes is playing someone so alien to her screen persona that she needs deprogramming to find her funny bone.