The Big Short - Film Review ★★★½

Smart, engaging, but fruitless.

The excess of Wall Street and at large capitalism is the focal point of this film, which explores how a bunch of dudes in the financial game made a shit load of money off of the 2008 crash. The film follows this money making from several different perspectives that is able to bring to life a huge part of business that is normal very cloak and dagger stuff, with the less the public knowing the better. Each of the main characters really had some genuine character to them, and the film was well-acted.

We are able to get a sense from this film that the game was rigged from the start, this may not be news to most people, but to the extent at which the guys up in their concrete palaces of New York are pulling the strings is quite unfathomable. The film does hold your hand through out, and to be frank, I'm grateful for it. I am certainly not up to date with the latest financial lingo and technicalities and the film recognizes this and spells it all out furthering the anti-big finance message that it is throwing at its audience. However, it falls short in so far as there is no genuine solution brought up from the narrative itself, even the characters who have become incredibly disillusioned by it all still make their millions, despite all the posturing and monologue of how shit some of the big bankers are. There lacks any real message other than the banks are fucked, that they are in it purely for greed and no matter what happens to the markets there is money to be made and the working-class will forever be fucked regardless.


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