Brad Pitt, Christian Bale, Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling team up in the new film "The Big Short" about the credit and housing bubble collapse in the mid-2000s. NY1's Neil Rosen filed the following review.
"The Big Short" is the name of a new film that features an all-star cast and centers around the the real estate and financial collapse that happened near the end of the last decade.
The film actually starts in 2005 and looks at four guys, working in the world of high finance, who accurately predicted the credit and housing bubble collapse, which wound up crashing the stock market in 2008.
The problem with the movie is that there is little or no backstory to any of the characters. It's just a technical dissertation on how the housing bubble collapsed, and it's loaded with lingo like subprime mortgages, synthetic CDOs and lots of other confusing Wall Street terms.
Co-writer and director Adam McKay attempts to explain it all to you with amusing cameos by such celebrities as Selena Gomez and Anthony Bourdain playing themselves. That's funny, and that's what McKay, who also directed "Anchorman" and "Step Brothers," does best. But the bulk of the movie is more than two hours of numbers and Wall Street language, coming at you a mile a minute, and it's not only exhausting and repetitive, it becomes overkill.
Maybe if this was balanced with a personal story that one of the characters was going through, I would have taken the spoon-fed lesson. But we know the outcome in advance. Even though these guys predict that the market will fail and nobody else believes them, we know they're right, so there's no suspense and no rooting interest. We also know that the people on Wall Street got bailed out and that practically no one went to jail, like Steve Carell's character thinks they will. So what's left?
As far as the performances go, Carell was good, but Christian Bale is over the top and showboats as a prophetic, antisocial, shoeless executive who blasts heavy metal music. Brad Pitt is OK, but he's on screen very briefly. Ryan Gosling is the only one I found amusing, but even his schtick, like the entire movie, grows tiring after half an hour.
Neil Rosen's Big Apple Rating: Two apples