Cold Wallet
Among other things, a Christmas movie.
Short-fused divorced Dad Billy (Raul Castillo) sinks everything he has in a crypto scheme not ominously called Tulip and ropes his zen wrestler pal Dom (Tony Cavalero) in too … all in the hope of a financial miracle which will enable him to buy a dream home and share custody of his adoring daughter. Then he wakes up to find crypto bro Charles Hegel (Josh Brener) has supposedly died in Kenya and the whole Tulip fortune has disappeared. Paranoid hacker Eva (Melonie Diaz), who is in the same boat, works out that not only is Hegel not dead but he’s holed up in a nearby mansion – whereupon the trio of clueless investors stage a home invasion with the plan to get their money back and perhaps save the other suckers who’ve fallen for the scam. Of course, it’s not as simple as that.
Brener’s Hegel is a particularly modern, particularly reprehensible villain – a whiny little creep in a dressing gown who sees himself as a colossus and drips contempt for his victims but also wheedles in order to split up the trio and spin the situation to his advantage. It might be an issue that the victims of Hegel’s scam – who have to have some odd mix of smarts and naivete plus a desire to get a load of money for no effort – are pretty much the born losers he tags them as, and there’s a certain element of special pleading on the part of divorced Dads as if his moppet issues trump every other problem any regular person might have. Written by John Hibey and director Cutter Hodierne, it’s not especially suspenseful – we’re long past being excited by progress bars on phone screens – as an ill-thought-through plan trundles along, but it is well-acted and has a grasp on one of the crazier bubbles of the current age.
The isolated mansion in snowy woods has a fairytale, near-gothic feel but this mostly avoids haunted house tropes – it’s even a bit sad that the supervillain is holed up alone among whale memorabilia with a single grumpy caretaker and no idea how to spend his ill-gotten gains beyond being the sort of petulant, manipulative-but-bad-at-it asshole who wouldn’t have any friends no matter how rich he got.
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