Rogue Trader Review

The fall of Baring`s Merchant Bank was headline news around the world in 1995 - it was the work of one man, Nick Leeson ... Rogue Trader is his story. The film begins in a bar with a scene that doesn`t seem to have any relationship to anything following - Nick Leeson - Ewan McGregor - tries to stop a mate making a fool of himself over a girl and gets a barstool swipe across the nose for thanks. Via a voice-over we learn that because of Margaret Thatcher, London is now open territory for working class boys - Nick is one of them.... he doesn`t seem to do a very long apprenticeship before he`s put in charge of floor trading in futures for Barings at the Singapore International Money Exchange - SIMEX. And there, according to him, he`s caught up in bears and bulls beyond his power....This is such a lazy film..... the fact that Nick Leeson was able to lose in the end about 800 million pounds of Baring`s money - enough to bring the bank down - seems to rest on the fact that he had to deal with amateur traders in Singapore and old-school boys in England. It is a singularly unenlightening experience. The fact that this rampant greed is such a factor of life today is unexplored, the more personal experience of why a working class boy from Watford came to be in this position is overlooked. Should we view this film with suspicion because it`s based on Leeson`s ghost-written autobiography? It might be a good idea. It`s such an interesting story, it`s so uninteresting in the treatment it gets from writer/director James Deardon. It`s a boring, cynical film and deserves to go totally unnoticed except for Ewan McGregor`s performance which achieves charisma beyond its subject matter.David`s comments:I couldn`t get very interested in this film. High finance and futures exchanges are a deep dark secret for me, and if the people at Barings were so silly as to let a fast-talking hoon like Nick Leeson bankrupt them, well they deserved it. There`s no suspense, because we know the outcome, and Ewan McGregor gives a one-dimensional performance, while Anna Friel has a thankless role as his doormat wife. Looks like a telemovie.