People are greedy and not nice. What else is new?

Rating: 2/10 (28 January 2016)

Money corrupts. Not an original theme, yet this is what this movie is about. It lambasts most, if not all, of the major social institutions of modern society. Marriage, commerce, the mass media, work, the law - all are targeted for negative treatment. The problem is that none of this is surprising, new or insightful. Essentially, the movie is a soap opera, and not very good one. All the characters are flawed. Most remarkable is their intellectual shallowness equaled only by their selfishness and greed. The principal character, a woman named Joy, invents something and then immediately encounters difficulties trying to market it. She depends on others who repeatedly let her down. Finally, after repeatedly being ripped off, the light goes on inside her head. She finally realizes that people are not nice. Once she understands that, she becomes a success. Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper deliver strong performances. Robert DeNiro is okay as Joy's stupid father. However, this is not one of DeNiro's better performances. DeNiro tries to give his character some depth, but he fails because his character is simply too intellectually limited.