Rogue Trader came out only a few years after this dramatic event — one well-known to business-types to this day. I suspect that the entire production was too impressed by the source material. Or at least something as good as The Informant! These characters especially seem ripe for a farce. I see them more like people who found it convenient to ignore odd behavior because they were making a fortune. They were supposedly fooled by their belief in good ol’ British notions of honor. In addition to this, the people at Barings are presented as being simply too trusting. The third act is him on the run, but even that is low-key and uninteresting. The second act shows him doing this more and more while things do not turn around. The first act establishes what he does: hide bad trades and maintain them until things turn around. And nothing surprising happens in between. It starts at the beginning and ends at the end. What kills Rogue Trader is its entirely banal rendering of the story. The trading floor scenes generally have a lot of energy even while being easy to understand. When I first heard of it, I figured it would be a barebones made-for-TV production. (Fun fact: the real-life Danny plays the trader who gets in a fight with Tom Wu’s character.) And Lee Ross is excellent as Leeson’s best friend, Danny Argyropoulos. Tom Wu is irresistible as a swaggering young trader.
But there isn’t a whole lot for him to do other than stand around looking stressed.Īnna Friel as Leeson’s wife plays the role with just a hint of Marie Antoinette, so she doesn’t come off quite as anemic as she might otherwise. Ewan McGregor does a good job playing Leeson as a driven but oddly naive young man. As a director, he does a fine job of making this film a good deal less boring than it might have been. But he’s also had a notable career as a director with credits like Pascali’s Island and A Kiss Before Dying. He’s best known for writing the screenplay of Fatal Attraction. It is written and directed by James Dearden. We simply watch Leeson on his steady path to catastrophe. It does at least break from the usual by not presenting a redemption arc. Unfortunately, Rogue Trader is not nearly as interesting as I’d hoped. And he managed to lose over a billion dollars for Barings, bankrupting it in the process. Leeson was their trader at the SIMEX exchange. He worked for the venerable Barings Bank, which had been in business since 1762. You may not know who he is but he was big news in 1995. “A Duke has been sitting on this exchange since it was founded!” So I was curious to see Rogue Trader, the 1999 biopic about Nick Leeson. My favorite part of Trading Places is when Winthorpe and Valentine destroy the Duke brothers.
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