Rogue Trader Details

You'd think the true story of how Watford wide boy Nick Leeson brought about the collapse of Barings Merchant Bank, one of the oldest financial institutions in the City, through stock market stupidity in Singapore would make a cracking movie brimming with personal intrigues and trader insights. Sadly, under James Dearden's lacklustre direction, the tabloid tale is reduced to the level of a bland TV movie with its futures-market setting and bewildering jargon making it wilfully obscure to the point of abject disinterest. Leeson will doubtless be thrilled by Ewan McGregor's performance, painting him as a gambling cheeky chappie with a heart of gold. Everyone else will see it as spin-doctoring on heavy rotation. Nor is this long-on-the-shelf film helped by Anna Friel's awful performance as Mrs Leeson. But then even Meryl Streep would have had a hard time with the join-the-dots script, which patently doesn't ring true in any area it purports to explore.

A biopic, of a man who ruined one of London's most venerable merchant bankers, that should have made a perfect morality play on modern day values, but instead settles for a tabloid approach that explains and illumines nothing.