The Sheffield Star 24 June 1999 - "Rogue Trader" Review
No Baseball cap in sight for Ewan
Nick Leeson, you might recall, was that pasty-faced, unattractive, baseball cap-wearing working class boy from the suburbs who, through either ineptitude or greed - depending on whose version you believe - brought down the oldest banking institution in Britain.
The movies of course do not do pasty-faced or unattractive, so for film biography Rogue Trader (cert 15) Master Leeson is transformed into Ewan McGregor, with Anna Friel as the wife who stood by him until the going got too tough.
The baseball cap does get a look-in, though only as a jokey reference towards the climax of the drama, with Ewan - unlike the original - looking like a man who never wore such an item of headwear in his life before.
Disaster
Writer, producer and director James Dearden attempts to make Leeson's story into a morality tale for our time, casting the man as almost a victim of corporate greed, the thrust of the plot being that if somebody had kept tighter controls on their unlikely Golden Boy of the far eastern markets, a disaster might have been averted.
But the problem is that the story itself is far too complex to squeeze into a mere 90 minutes and even regular stops for McGregor to explain what is going to happen next do nothing to lessen the confusion.
Leeson's excuse for it all is that he ultimately gained nothing from the drama except a six-year jail sentence, which just makes him look lke a real loser - and losers are not the stuff that great movies are made of.