‘The Laundromat’ crudely mixes the dark and the light, blemishing everything

A widow (Meryl Streep) seeks an insurance payout after her husband is killed in a boat collapse, one of the many stories in “The Laundromat.” | Netflix

One of the things I loved about “The Big Short” was the consistently creative ways in which the film explained the intricacies of the financial crisis of 2007-08.

Every once in a while, they’d break the Fourth Wall, and we’d come away from the scene thinking, for example: Ah, so THAT’S how a subprime mortgage works. Thanks, Margot Robbie!

Steven Soderbergh’s “The Laundromat” employs similar techniques in an effort to shed some light on (and assign blame for) the machinations behind the Panama Papers insurance scandal.

Alas, by the time everything comes out in the wash, so to speak, we’ve been overwhelmed by a dizzying array of tricked-out visuals and stylized sequences, with the end result being a muddled, meandering, hit-and-miss social satire and political commentary that’s too heavy on the latter category and often lacking in the former.

One minute, Antonio Banderas and Gary Oldman are wearing matching pinstripe suits and walking through the desert and cheerfully outlining how things worked. Then they enter a door and we’re in a cavernous, crowded nightclub with pulsating EDM music.

Later, we drop in a domestic drama involving a wealthy, African-born American businessman (Nonso Anozie) who gets caught shagging his daughter’s college roommate — and offers her control of his $20 million shell company in exchange for her not telling Mom what she knows.

Oh, but there’s also a story thread about a recently widowed senior citizen who is shocked by the insultingly small payout from the insurance company for a tour boat that capsized, resulting in the deaths of her husband and 20 others.

And what’s up with those two vacationing gringos who wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time and end up, well, having their trip cut short? They’re in the movie for maybe four minutes and then poof! We move on.

I wish I could tell you this shambling, cryptic, tone-shifting mash-up of so many different stories (and there are more) eventually comes together in one smartly conceived, cleverly executed, cohesive package — but that never happens. In fact, the final, self-conscious, ta-da! moment only serves to lessen the impact of the proceedings to that point, and the speech we get about political and financial corruption feels more like a hectoring lecture than an insightful commentary.

Inspired by Jake Bernstein’s non-fiction book “Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite,” “The Laundromat” has a mostly light and farcical tone — although the story kicks off with a serious, realistic and expertly rendered sequence in which Meryl Streep’s Ellen Martin and her husband (James Cromwell) are enjoying their golden years, taking a leisurely pleasure cruise on a boat on New York’s Lake George, when a wave comes out of nowhere and topples the boat, resulting in the drowning deaths of nearly two dozen people, including Ellen’s husband.

As financial adviser David Schwimmer explains to the small businessman (Robert Patrick) who owned the tour boat, in an effort to cut costs he had switched to a dirt-cheap insurance company, which has changed hands and is now operated by a shell company operated by Jeffrey Wright in the tiny Caribbean island (and tax haven) of Nevis.

The Jeffrey Wright character has two families: one in Nevis and one in Florida. What this has to do with the main story remains beyond me. It’s just another unnecessary detour along the long and winding road.

Sharon Stone shows up as slick Vegas a real estate agent who sells Ellen’s dream condo to some shady Russians willing to pay twice as much — in cash. In an admittedly entertaining sequence that plays like an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” Rosalind Chao is the wife of a Chinese diplomat conspiring with a venal international businessman (Matthias Schoenaerts) on illegal transactions worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Gary Oldman (left) and Antonio Banderas play specialists in Panamanian tax shelters in “The Laundromat.”

And every now and then, Oldman and Banderas return as Jurgen Mossack and Roman Fonseca, respectively, proprietors of a Panamanian law firm that provided billions of dollars of offshore financial services to thousands of companies, and shell companies, and shell companies overseeing the shell companies. They never apologize for their actions, claiming all they did was take advantage of existing loopholes and the laws in various countries (including of course the United States) providing enormous tax breaks to the richest of the rich.

All these side detours, while often amusing, provide little in the way of illumination and much in the way of viewer frustration. The main story keeps stalling out in favor of these drive-by interludes that take center stage for a few minutes and then fade into the background, usually never to be heard from again.

It’s a lot of spin cycle without much being folded into neat and tidy stacks.