“Now, privacy and secrecy are two different things. Privacy is locking the bathroom door when you want to take a pee. Secrecy, on the other hand, is locking the door because what you are doing in the bathroom is not what people usually do.”

I didn’t need a whacky and exaggerated Steven Soderbergh exposé to tell me that wicked shysters make beaucoup bucks in legal gray areas, ruthlessly operating in a system where “the slaves are unaware, both of their status and of their masters, who exist in a world apart, and where the shackles are hidden amidst reams of unreachable legalese.” Nevertheless, there is The Laundromat, which takes the Adam McKay approach to the Panama Papers, enlivening a rather dry and convoluted subject by dressing it up with meta humor and star power.

Narrated in the first person by the cofounders of the Mossack Fonseca law firm (Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas, having the time of their lives), the film choppily depicts a trio of vignettes centering on a widow (Meryl Streep) who seeks an insurance payout for her husband’s (James Cromwell) death in a freak boating accident, the daughter (Jessica Allain) of a billionaire (Nonso Anozie) who is left empty-handed after accepting a nasty bribe from her father, and a money launderer (Matthias Schoenaerts) who gets mixed up with the wrong family of Chinese racketeers.

With cameos and small roles for the likes of Sharon Stone, David Schwimmer, Jeffrey Wright, Will Forte, Chris Parnell, Melissa Rauch, Robert Patrick, Rosalind Chao, and Nikki Amuka-Bird, among others, The Laundromat is never uninteresting—even when it’s didactic it’s at least mildly entertaining—but neither does it really come together to make the enlightening point it obviously intends to. The smug, pontificating denouement, which features Streep speaking directly into the camera as herself, does the film no favors, nor does the conflict between the production’s artificiality and the screenplay’s turn toward grandstanding.