But when a Hollywood comedy turns the crime of the century into a satisfying lark, you know a huge gamble has been won. McKay’s zaniness has a precedent: like Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Dr Strangelove’, ‘The Big Short’ is a gleeful tumble toward the apocalypse – except in this case, it actually happened. Then he brings on the strippers and the crocodile that now lives in the abandoned swimming pool. He brings on the smirking agents who sold multiple homes to strippers. More than any filmmaker who’s taken on this subject to date, he sees the banking crisis as a shriek of ego, which it was. Mostly, though, the movie’s a sick thrill, a toast to the douchebags.ĭirector Adam McKay is the man behind movies like ‘Anchorman’. Almost half-heartedly, ‘The Big Short’ reminds us – via a beardy Brad Pitt playing an eco-conscious trader – that millions of lives will be ruined. Still, it’s impossible not to be swept up by their Cassandra-in-the-wilderness craziness. As chronicled in Michael Lewis’s 2010 bestseller (on which the script is based), they all made a killing betting against the banks, while billions in pensions and savings went up in smoke.
#AC/DC SHOOK ME ALL NIGHT LONG MOVIE#
They’re an extremely unpleasant bunch to build a movie around. But it will nevertheless leave you feeling somewhat. They are among the few who predicted the 2008 financial collapse in America years in advance. The Big Short is funny and incisive often intermittently, but still and is probably McKay’s most complex and mature film to date.
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A third, investment consultant Mark Baum (Steve Carell), steals cabs from more patient New Yorkers as he hustles his way to high-pressure meetings.Īnd yet, in this subversive, riotous movie, these men are our heroes (of a sort).
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Another guy, our narrator, Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling, on fire), yells his colleagues out of the executive toilets.
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One guy, real-life ex-hedge fund manager Michael Burry (Christian Bale, with near-Aspergian intensity), blares heavy metal out of his office as he analyses the paperwork of thousands of failing home loans. They’re not exactly the Fellowship of the Ring.