The Big Short Review

iIf you were to ask a random person on the street to explain the financial crisis of '07, odds are with a strange look the person wouldn't be able to give you a straight forward answer. This is where Adam McKay's The Big Short comes in. The movie is about this group of Wall Street business men that discover the ground work of the financial crisis and are looking to profit from the ignorance of the banks and the public. And if you're thinking that even though you have some knowledge of how the market works but are thinking that there are going to be terms in this movie that can go over the head of even the most knowledgeable wall street yuppy, you would be correct. However, the movie does a good job in explaining the definitions of certain terms by using celebrity cameos like Anthony Bourdain, Selena Gomez and even Margot Robbie in a bath tub to explain terms used in the movie and on Wall Street. It's helpful for people like me who has very little knowledge of economic terms.

The Big Short follows a lot of Hollywood Wall Street movies like Wolf of Wall Street and Wall Street. What the big short does different from those movies is that The Big Short actually looks at how the banks and the housing crisis worked instead of focusing on an individual. In this movie you get a plethora of characters from Steve Carrel's character Mike Baum (who is based on money manager Steve Eisman) to Brad Pitt's off the grid former stock broker Ben Rickert.

The movie is sort of a reverse heist movie, as the characters look to put money back into the economy. It is addressed in the movie that if the characters succeed in predicting the financial crash they will profit from it but also that millions of people will be out of jobs and businesses will suffer from the crash. It's a very big moral dilemma for the characters. Yes, they can go against the over confident banks and profit from their stupidity but if they are right, it will not be good for the rest of America.

The momentum of the movie never slows down and I think it's because of the unique editing style of the movie. It's a fun movie given the subject matter. It does not shy away from the serious moments but it's still darkly humorous.

Grade: A