Director: Adam McKay
N&G: Sergei, Grade 12
Rating: 4/5
The Big Short is a perfect blend of humour and tragedy that can captivate any viewer on the niche topic of the 2008 real estate market collapse of America. Based on real events and people, the film follows three separate but concurrent stories of financial companies and businessmen witnessing the beginning of the housing bubble crash which devastated the United States in 2008 and making extreme profits from it through the act of shorting the housing market. The movie brings a great blend of comedy and sadness when showing the consequences of extremely poor banking decisions done by multiple banks of America. An example of such comedy could be seen in the multiple inserted cameos of celebrities which explain extremely complex financial topics through relating it to their craft. Anthony Bourdain was one such cameo, with him explaining collateralized debt obligation through the analogy of seafood. Although this film can be very fun and thrilling to watch, the complexity of the financial topics and financial jargon can be overwhelming. At times I was finding myself not being able to follow the events happening because I did not fully understand the reasoning behind them. The film had a star-studded cast, with actors like Brad Pitt, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, and Steve Carrell. All of these actors have done an amazing job at portraying accurate parodies of the people the characters were based on. Overall, this film is a fun and insightful watch on the inner workings of finance and the drama behind it, with the only downside being the complexity of the niche financial topics and language.